Community feedback is an integral part of any software development cycle. That’s why we continue to release new preview versions of Windows Management Framework (WMF) 5.0: so that we can hear about and fix real-world problems before they ship with the next version of Windows.

Historically, our guidance for filing bugs and feature requests, for both WMF5 and previous versions of PowerShell, has been to use our Microsoft Connect page. Our ability to pick up and address issues on Connect has varied throughout the life of PowerShell.

As Microsoft has shifted towards a more customer-oriented culture, we have been looking at Connect on a more frequent basis, tracking bugs internally and implementing popular feature requests.

To coincide with this shift in focus, we have simplified the Connect interface and submission forms to decrease the friction required to submit feedback:

It’s important that you vote up bugs or feedback that impacts you or your customers the most. While we’ll do our best to address as much feedback as possible, there is only so much time in a given development cycle. Not all bugs can be high-priority, and some minor edge cases may never be addressed.

We recognize that many other product groups within Microsoft have begun to use UserVoice for feature requests. However, we have a lot of feedback and bug reports already in the Connect database that we still intend to triage, track, and address. With the UI improvements we’ve made and some pending improvements to search and backend tooling, we believe Connect will remain a better choice for our needs.

Thanks for reading! Please continue to provide us feedback on your PowerShell experiences leveraging Connect as we seek to improve this process throughout the coming months. I’m looking forward to a more open dialogue that enables us to improve PowerShell together.

Joey Aiello
PM, Microsoft PowerShell