Announcing PowerShell Crescendo General Availability (GA)

Jason Helmick

We are pleased to announce the General Availability (GA) release of PowerShell Crescendo, a framework to rapidly develop PowerShell cmdlets for common command line tools, regardless of platform.

The release is now available for download on the PowerShell Gallery.

Making Cmdlets with PowerShell Crescendo

Crescendo is a development accelerator enabling you to rapidly build PowerShell cmdlets that leverage existing command-line tools. Crescendo amplifies the command-line experience of the original tool to include object output for the PowerShell pipeline, privilege elevation, and integrated help information. A Crescendo module replaces cumbersome command-line tools with PowerShell cmdlets that are easier to use in automation and packaged to share with team members.

The GA release includes the following features and benefits:

• Ability to define cmdlets from simple key/value statements in a JSON file
• Support for modular design – cmdlet definitions can be in a one or more JSON files
• A JSON schema that helps you create your Crescendo configuration using IntelliSense and tooltips
• Three styles of output handling code allowing you to separate your code from the cmdlet definitions for easier debugging and development
• Privilege elevation mechanisms in Windows, Linux, and macOS
• Crescendo generates a PowerShell script module ready for deployment
• While Crescendo requires PowerShell 7 or higher for authoring configurations, the generated module can run on Windows PowerShell 5.1 and higher
• Example configurations for you to copy and reuse
• Experimental Help parsers that provide proof-of-concept examples for auto-generating cmdlet configurations

Installing Crescendo

Requirements:

• Microsoft.PowerShell.Crescendo requires PowerShell 7.0 or higher

To install Microsoft.PowerShell.Crescendo:

Install-Module -Name Microsoft.PowerShell.Crescendo

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

Install-PSResource -Name Microsoft.PowerShell.Crescendo

More information

To get started using Crescendo, check out the documentation.

Future plans

We value your ideas and feedback and hope you will 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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