Powershell: Produce ref assembly for PowerShell Standard 5.1 to enable portable modules

[SteveL-MSFT]

EDIT by @joeyaiello: this is for PowerShell Standard 5.1 now. We need to make the definition and publish it.

Intent is to enable module authors to target this library to build portable modules that work across different versions of Windows PowerShell and PowerShell Core. Tests would need to validate against Windows PowerShell 5.1 and PSCore6 Windows/Linux/Mac.

[SteveL-MSFT]

Published as https://www.nuget.org/packages/PowerShellStandard.Library/3.0.0-preview-01

[iSazonov]

Should we document the fact in our guides?

[SteveL-MSFT]

Yes, reopening this to make sure we have docs and sample

[joeyaiello]

This is a dupe of #4809, I'm repurposing this one for 5.1.

[rkeithhill]

We could really use this. Been hitting issues trying to get PSReadLine to compile on Linux as a netstandard2.0 library. It doesn't work against PS.L v3 because the module uses debugger properties that were added after v3. Also been trying to get PSES to compile as netstandard2.0 on Linux and I run into a missing property (SupportsVirtualTerminal) on the PSHostUserInterface interface.

BTW should the current library be renamed PowerShellStandard.3.Library and the new one be called PowerShellStandard.5.1.Library? Kind of like you've done with the ref assemblies. It's a little weird using the version of the package to indicate the version of PowerShell it targets. Just sayin'. :-)

[jherby2k]

Would also love to see/test this soon, as you're at "RC" stage now but don't even have a preview library for creating PowerShell 6/5.1 binary modules.

[SteveL-MSFT]

@JamesWTruher is actively working on this, but it's not that simple. We'll likely have a PSStd6-Preview by GA and 5.1 after that. He needed to create tooling to generate these reference assemblies as the PSStd3-preview was created manually by hand.

[powercode]

I would like to see IArgumentCompleter interface added to the ref assembly. The absense of it breaks most of my modules :(

[Jaykul]

Definitely still need this.

Even just publishing a reference of the PowerShell Core version of System.Management.Automation to Nuget would be greatly appreciated...

[iSazonov]

We have PR #5894 in the direction - please review.

[jherby2k]

Sorry, blows my mind that this wasn't a top deliverable for GA. How do you expect to drive adoption in 3rd party libraries if developers can't even target it?

[jherby2k]

Any plans for an RTM version?

[SteveL-MSFT]

Closing this issue as the working is being done here: https://github.com/powershell/powershellstandard