I was watching the PowerShell 20th birthday show when that message came by, and sure enough, the 1.0 release had just been published on GitHub. A birthday present for PowerShell, and a good reason to take a proper look at what changed.

Yesterday PowerShell turned 20. Windows PowerShell 1.0 was released on November 14, 2006, at Microsoft’s IT Forum in Barcelona, a few years after Jeffrey Snover laid out the idea in the Monad Manifesto.

On November 10 the PowerShell team released 7.7.0, built on .NET 11, together with 7.6.10 for the 7.6 LTS line. The same day, 7.4 and 7.5 went out of support (see PowerShell 7.4 and 7.5 Retire on November 10).

On Friday evening a mail from Microsoft Azure came in: “Retirement notice: Migrate from Azure Blueprints by 31 January 2027”. It came through my own Service Health alert on my demo subscription, which surprised me: as far as I remembered, I never got round to using Blueprints.

Third roundup of the year, covering August and September, plus what October brought so far: three patch waves and the first 7.7 release candidate. The previous one ran up to the end of July. Pester had a busy summer too, with two feature releases in five weeks — more on that below.

A short public service announcement: PowerShell 7.4 (LTS) and PowerShell 7.5 both reach end of support on November 10, 2026. That’s less than two weeks from now, and as far as I can find there’s no PowerShell team blog post reminding anyone. So here’s one.