I’m excited to announce a new feature for Invoke-WebRequest and Invoke-RestMethod that will ship with PowerShell Core 6.1.0: Resume Downloads!
This is a feature that has been requested many times throughout the years and I’m please to say that it will be included in the next release of PowerShell Core. You should be able to preview the feature in 6.1.0-preview.2.
You can se the code changes in PR #6447.
In Part 3 we successfully made the first glue between Azure Functions and AWS CodeCommit by making it possible to manually trigger the Azure Functions Web App to pull from the AWS CodeCommit repository. Obviously, a manual pull is not ideal. It is certainly not a Continuous Delivery.
In Part 4 we lay the groundwork for the 2nd piece of glue between Azure Functions and AWS CodeCommit. In order to automatically trigger a pull AWS CodeCommit from Azure Functions, we need an AWS Lambda. AWS Lambda and Azure Functions are somewhat analogous. They serve almost identical purposes in their respective clouds. We also need to create a KMS key that will be used for encrypting and decrypting secrets.
Recently the PowerShell Team published their PowerShell Core 6.1 Roadmap. Several questions have come up about 6.1 plans for Invoke-WebRequest and Invoke-RestMethod. You may have noticed there is no mention of the Web Cmdlets in their roadmap. That is because the majority of the feature work for the cmdlets is being done by yours truly. As I am a community member and not a Microsoft employee, it would make sense that my work is not included in their blog. Anyway, I felt it was a good idea to share what I have in store for the next 6 months.
I should warn that this is more accurately called "Mark Kraus's PowerShell Core 6.1 Web Cmdlets Wish List" rather than a roadmap. I only have 2 features that are pretty much approved. The rest will depend on whether or not the changes actually get accepted. Also, I'm not part of any team working on this. It's just me and the issue queue back log of feature requests and bugs. If your company wants to hire me to work full time on the Web Cmdlets, then hit me up. Otherwise, this is all a side project for me and life happens. So please don't hold me to any deadlines! :)
In Part 1, I covered the primary changes in the actual code base of the PowerShell Core Web Cmdlets Invoke-RestMethod and Invoke-WebRequest and how those changes manifest themselves in the PowerShell user experience.
In Part 2, I covered outstanding issues as well missing and/or deprecated features.
In Part 3, I will cover new features available in PowerShell Core 6.0.0 Invoke-RestMethod & Invoke-WebRequest. I will also cover future plans for the cmdlets.
If you have not read Part 1 and Part 2, please do so before reading Part 3. This blog series goes in depth and requires a great many words to do so. To save space I will not repeat some information and will assume the reader as read Part 1 and Part 2.
A quick bit of news: PowerShell Core v6.0.0-rc.2 was released. Unless any blocking issues are discovered, this will be the final RC release and the next release will be GA in January 2018.
In Part 1, I covered the primary changes in the actual code base of the PowerShell Core Web Cmdlets Invoke-RestMethod and Invoke-WebRequest and how those changes manifest themselves in the PowerShell user experience.
In Part 2, I will cover outstanding issues as well missing and/or deprecated features. Some of this will be an extension of Part 1 because some of the feature reduction is due mostly to the switch to HttpClient. Any plans or fixes I mention in this section are tentative and may change when and/or if they are implemented.
If you have not read Part 1, please do so before reading Part 2. This blog series goes in depth and requires a great many words to do so. To save space I will not repeat some information and will assume the reader as read Part 1.
Also, this will be my first blog post as a new Microsoft MVP. I wanted to take a quick moment to thank the people who nominated me and the PowerShell community for your support in getting me here. It is a great honor and I am overjoyed! Thank you!
I recently spoke at the North Texas PC Users Group's PowerShell Special Interest Group on the topic of the Web Cmdlets in PowerShell Core. I spoke for full hour because there is just so much new and different about Invoke-RestMethod and Invoke-WebRequest between Windows PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell Core 6.0.0. In fact, because I was limited to an hour, I couldn't go as in depth or cover as many things as I would have liked. This blog series will cover what I covered in that presentation and more. At this time I plan to have 3 parts with a possible 4th as an addendum should anything change between now and GA.
Pictured: A packet capture of a current build of PowerShell Core submitting a multipart/form-data POST request from Invoke-WebRequest.
Over the past few months I have been donating a generous portion of my spare time to help improve the Web Cmdlets (Invoke-WebRequest and Invoke-RestMethod) in PowerShell Core. This is partly because I want and need certain functionality for both personal and work related projects. It is also because I have had some minor gripes about these Cmdlets for some time.
One common ask I have seen repeated in just about every PowerShell forum is multipart/form-data support. It seems like a reasonable thing to ask when there are many endpoints that will only work with a multipart/form-data submission. There is an open issue (#2112) on the PowerShell GitHub echoing the same request. It was brought to my attention and I decided to give it a serious look.
The result is that PowerShell Core now has partial multipart/form-data support in both Web Cmdlets. This change didn't make the cut for 6.0.0-beta.7 but it will be available starting in 6.0.0-beta.8 and is available now if you build it manually or grab the latest nightly build.
This blog will cover some of the challenges involved in supporting multipart/form-data, how to make use of this new feature, and about future plans for additional support.
Because typing multipart/form-data is annoying, I will be shortening it to just multipart. Please don't let this be mistaken for other multipart submission methods.
Also, I will be referring collectively to Invoke-WebRequest and Invoke-RestMethod as Web Cmdlets. In this case, there is no need to call out each command as they offer the same base functionality for multipart support.
I took a significant break from commits to my PSRAW project. I have spent that time learning more about Open Source projects and Object Oriented Programming. Before I could move the project forward I had some architectural decisions to make and I don't have quite enough knowledge to make those decisions yet, but I'm getting there.
On July 14th, this blog from Microsoft dropped a bit of a bombshell on the PowerShell community by making it clear the path forward is in PowerShell Core.Windows PowerShell will still be developed/maintained, but the primary focus will be PowerShell Core. There was also a call to test out PowerShell Gallery modules. I put off the leap to Core for awhile, but it seemed that now was the time. My module is still young and flexible and I suspected that most of it would work on Core.
Shortly after that blog post, I unleashed the Kraken and created a new branch in my local PSRAW repo named CoreRefactor, installed PowerShellCore 6.0.0-beta.4, switched VS Code to use PowerShell Core for the integrated terminal, and fired up my pester tests. Thus flowed a glorious sea of red failures and errors. This kicked off 2 weeks of refactoring. I wanted to share what I have learned from the experience.
At the time of this post PowerShellCore 6.0.0-beta.5 has just been released. I just completed my test against it. So everything in this post is at least relevant to that release.
