For some of you,
it might matter what PowerShell 7 release branch you install from. Now
Microsoft has been doing this for a while going back to the PowerShell
Core days. Organizations have options.
Many large organizations tend to lean towards the
long‑term service branch, or LTS.
This version is synced with the LTS release of .NET
Core. PowerShell 7 is the LTS release.
This means it has about three years of support and doesn't need to be updated.
The branch information is maintained online at this URL. It's
just a JSON file that you can take a look at.
The stable branch is the current active PowerShell release,
and as of the time I'm recording this course,
this is also PowerShell 7.
Microsoft typically releases a new stable branch about every six months.
And if I recall correctly,
this branch is supported for about a year and a half. And
this too has a web resource that you can use to determine
the current stable build.
Finally, because PowerShell is under a very active development,
there's almost always a preview build available.
This is what is coming next. Today,
PowerShell 7 is in preview. Now, eventually it will be
released and become the new stable release.
I assume shortly thereafter we'll see a preview release for PowerShell 7.2.
And as with the other releases, you can keep track online.
PowerShell 7 includes a mechanism to notify you of any new updates.
Now for the most part, most of you probably won't need to do anything.
However, you can explicitly set an environment variable.
If you don't set it, PowerShell will use your current branch.
You might want to set this to LTS if you were on that branch and wanted to
make sure that your users don't get prompted, or you yourself don't get
prompted, to update to something other than the LTS release. PowerShell
will check for updates about every 24 hours. You'll get a notification the
next time you start PowerShell that there is a new version available for
you to install.
But you can disable that notification by setting this
environmental variable in your PowerShell profile, or
however you manage environment variables.
Your other option is to build your own notification system using
the release channel links I showed you earlier.
Regardless, Microsoft won't automatically update to
newer versions of PowerShell. At best, what you'll get is a notification that there's a new update available for you.