Announcing PowerShell Crescendo 1.1.0-RC1

Jason Helmick

We’re pleased to announce the release of PowerShell Crescendo 1.1.0-RC1. Crescendo is a framework to rapidly develop PowerShell cmdlets for common command line tools, regardless of platform. This release includes improved support for PSScriptAnalyzer, improvements to error handling, and the addition of ExcludeAsArgument parameter property.

This is a community driven release built from the many suggestions and requests received directly or from our Github. Thank you PowerShell Community for your adoption and suggestions!

The Release Candidate is now available for download on the PowerShell Gallery.

Installing Crescendo

Requirements:

• Microsoft.PowerShell.Crescendo requires PowerShell 7.2 or higher

To install Microsoft.PowerShell.Crescendo:

Install-Module -Name Microsoft.PowerShell.Crescendo -AllowPreRelease

To install Microsoft.PowerShell.Crescendo using the new PowerShellGet v3:

Install-PSResource -Name Microsoft.PowerShell.Crescendo -PreRelease

Highlighted features

This Release Candidate includes many fixes and suggestions. Here are just a few of the highlights added for this release.

• Using ScriptAnalyzer with exported module generates a ton of output (Thanks @DennisL68)
• Increase UX of Crescendo-generated cmdlets (Thanks @steviecoaster)
• CrescendoNativeErrorQueue and -ErrorAction Stop (Thanks @MTI-gh)
• Crescendo should probably set $PSNativeCommandUseErrorActionPreference = $false (Thanks JamesWTruher)
• Add the current version of the Crescendo module (Thanks @LaurentDardenne)

Using ScriptAnalyzer with exported module generates a ton of output

Using PSScriptAnalyzer on a Crescendo generated module could result in several violations of the PSAvoidTrailingWhiteSpace rule. This was due to an additional trailing space after generated commands. The code generator for Crescendo has been updated to remove the trailing whitespace.

Increase UX of Crescendo-generated cmdlets

Crescendo is designed to pass parameters defined in the configuration as arguments to the native application. There are times when you may wish to pass a parameter to the output handler but not the native application. To enable this, a new boolean parameter property ExcludeAsArgument set to true prevents the argument from being sent to the native application. The default is false.

"Parameters": [
        {
            "Name": "P1",
            "ParameterType": "string",
            "ExcludeAsArgument": true,
            "Mandatory": false,
            "Description": "Variable not sent to native app"
        }
    ],

CrescendoNativeErrorQueue and -ErrorAction Stop

Handling errors using Pop-CrescendoNativeError may include multiple errors from the same execution. This can happen when the cmdlet and the native command both emit an error that gets enqueued by Crescendo. The architecture is modified so that the error queue is now local to the cmdlet.

Crescendo should probably set $PSNativeCommandUseErrorActionPreference = $false

By default, $PSNativeCommandUseErrorActionPreference is set to true. This causes Crescendo to produce an additional error record for every error. To prevent this, Crescendo changes the value to false for each generated cmdlet.

Add the current version of the Crescendo module

Crescendo modules now include version and schema metadata at the top of the module.

# Module created by Microsoft.PowerShell.Crescendo
# Version: 1.1.0
# Schema: https://aka.ms/PowerShell/Crescendo/Schemas/2022-06
# Generated at: 07/13/2023 12:48:59

More information

To get started using Crescendo, check out the documentation.

Future plans

We value your ideas and feedback and hope you give Crescendo a try. Stop by our GitHub repository and let us know of any issues you find or features you would like added.

Jason Helmick PROGRAM MANAGER 2, Control Plane-JWINTER-OPEX-1010

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