Five weeks after Pester 6.0, Pester 6.1.0 was released on August 11. It’s a point release in name, but it fills the obvious gap in the new assertions: writing your own Should-* assertions that behave like the built-in ones.

Time for the next sweep. The spring roundup stopped at the April patch wave, so this one picks up from there and runs to the end of July. The biggest single release in this window was Pester 6.0, so that goes first.

I built a VS Code extension: Azure DevOps Pipelines Enhanced. It shows your Azure DevOps pipeline runs right in VS Code, so you don’t have to keep a browser tab open to see whether your build went green.

At this year’s PSConfEU, Jeffrey Snover — the creator of PowerShell — gave a session called Navigating the AI Revolution. One idea stuck with me: engineering is how we take something that isn’t perfect yet and make it useful anyway. With AI specifically, the answer isn’t to trust it blindly — it’s to build verification layers around it. Validate the output. Trust, but verify.

That hit a nerve, because if I’m honest I’m a bit of a perfectionist and a bit of a control-freak. AI velocity is real and I want it — but handing work to something that’s confidently wrong sometimes goes against every instinct I have. So I’ve been trying to let the reins go a little, and the thing that makes that bearable is the same thing that’s always made me comfortable shipping code: tests. This post is about one testing layer in particular — Playwright MCP — and how it lets me let go without flying blind.

This week, during my summer holiday, I was refreshing my mailbox in between activities when the email came in on Wednesday afternoon: my Microsoft MVP award has been renewed for 2026–2027! It’s my first renewal — last year I joined the program — so I can officially make it two years now.

I was a guest on the July 13th episode of The PowerShell Podcast with Andrew Pla.
The episode, Write the Test First – Robert Prüst on Pester, PSConf, and Learning in Public, is now available!