Although Microsoft has already vowed to work on Windows 11 pain points, especially for consumers, this year, another equally important aspect the company will be investing effort, time, and money in is the tooling used by power users and IT admins. To that end, it has now detailed some areas it will be working on when it comes to PowerShell, OpenSSH, and more in 2026.
Above everything else, Microsoft has emphasized that security is a priority which takes precedence over feature development. This is in line with an announcement that Redmond made back in 2024, when it said that security will be the top priority for the firm moving forward. Apart from that, the firm will be prioritizing the patching of critical issues reported by the community.
In 2026, Microsoft will be pouring its efforts into PowerShell 7.7, which will bring several improvements. For starters, PowerShell stores user content such as modules and profiles in the Documents folder by default, which doesn"t result in a great experience since many users sync this directory with OneDrive. Microsoft published details of a design change in 2025, and it will be implementing this in an early preview of PowerShell 7.7 this year. This is a big change because it can break existing solutions, so the idea is to cause minimum disruption.
This release of PowerShell will also see the ability to load modules and register features without updating the profile script. Other enhancements include delayed update notifications to accommodate package managers, support for aliases and macros in the style of Bash, and the implementation of a dedicated MCP server.
Meanwhile, the PSReadLine module will get context-aware predictive IntelliSense. A big update coming to the module will also decouple the keyboard input reading process from terminal rendering. The benefits of this design change will not be immediately visible to users, but Microsoft promises that it will make things a lot easier for future enhancements.
Switching gears to Windows OpenSSH, Microsoft is considering the addition of support for EntraID authentication in its fork. Other enhancements planned for 2026 are summarized below:
- PowerShellGallery/PSResourceGet
- Complete Microsoft Artifact Registry (MAR) migration
- Concurrency and performance improvements
- General improvements to reliability, scalability, and security
- Desired State Configuration v3 (DSC)
- General availability of version 3.2
- Python adapter to create DSC resources in Linux usage scenarios
- Work on version 3.3 will kick off
While all of this is exciting stuff, it will be interesting to see if Microsoft can accomplish all of its goals set for these tools in 2026.