Our PowerCLI team has been making great strides in working toward the next release. In doing so, we wanted to give everyone a heads up on one of the improvements taking place.
Improvements
In the next release we will be moving away from .Net 2.0 and PowerShell 2.0. PowerCLI will be built on .Net Framework 4.5 allowing for better performance, greater functionality, and many other features and improvements that come with leveraging .Net 4.5. This means that PowerCLI will run entirely on Common Language Runtime (CLR) 4.0 and PowerShell 3.0 or later.
Users will not directly notice all of the improvements and features of moving to .Net 4.5 immediately as this move will aid the development and the build of the product itself. Moving to .Net 4.5 has significantly aided in developing some of our new features that will be available in future releases and we look forward to even more great functionality being delivered to the end user as a result of this move. Essentially, this is setting up PowerCLI to more productively deliver robust new features.
What impact does that have on me?
At this time, we wanted to notify everyone of this change ahead of time, not just as a courtesy, but also to give ample time to those who may need to update their systems to meet the future prerequisites of the coming PowerCLI releases.
For users running Windows 8 or Window Server 2012 (or later), everything will run out of the box and all prerequisites will already be met. For those running operating systems older than Windows 8 and Server 2012: ( 2008, Windows 7, etc.), Users will be required to install .Net 4.5 and PowerShell 3 or later as prerequisites.
Windows Server 2003 will be required to upgrade to a newer OS to utilize future versions of PowerCLI, otherwise they will only be able to continue using the current version.
More Information
For those of you interested in what .Net Framework 4.5 brings to the table for developers, you can see the list of new features and improvements HERE.
