Windows Sandbox can't run PowerShell?!?

Hi,

Thank you for writing to Microsoft Community Forums.

I appreciate your effort on this and I thank you for bringing this issue to our notice. I would encourage you to provide your valuable feedback in Feedback hub so that our development team can review your suggestions. To provide your feedback, please refer to the article Send feedback to Microsoft with the Feedback Hub app.

Regards,

Nikhar Khare

Microsoft Community - Moderator

Apparently the issue is caused by update KB4495620 to the .NET framework.

Uninstalling KB4495620 resolves the issue (but that's only available if you haven't done a clean install / reset).

I've filed a bug report to Microsoft. The problem and solution is also mentioned here:

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/c4892556-7170-4d02-aa43-f26ce07c51b8/cant-run-net-app-in-windows-10-sandbox-version-1903?forum=netfxbcl

Hi Nikhar_K,

I wanted to jump in because I see too many of these sort of replies from Microsoft Employees (I'm assuming you are employed by Microsoft?)

1) Why does the user need to go through a feed-back hub if the problem was stated in this forum, with a reply from a "Microsoft Agent | Moderator"

2) Is it Microsoft's policy that an employee that is tasked to monitor such messages can't relay this message internally?  I find it super frustrating that the user has to keep repeating the issue over and over on different platforms before it is "officially received."  This is ridiculous, it's like being bounced from agent to agent over the phone having to explain your situation over and over again rather than the first agent the customer connected to can't take notes or relay messages...

3) These forums are great for discussion of various topics of Microsoft's products, are the official moderators and "Microsoft Agents" not actual employees but volunteers?  I can understand if they are volunteers, but it's 2019, surely there's a way to package up the bug reports and legitimate issues customers face to be directly forwarded to these "Feedback Hubs?"

Not attacking you personally, just really sick and tired of seeing these sort of canned responses from employees of companies where you make the customer do the legwork when they have raised legitimate concerns and unexpected behaviors from their products...

I agree. Well said. you would think Microsnot  would be  smart enough to copy and paste from here into feedback hub by their support personnel directly. Duh. Guess not.

You know you are in deep trouble when you know more than the tech support you are contacting.

My biggest problem with replies like this is that they are admitting that a) the problem is real but "some other group"TM is required to solve the problem, b) that in no way will they allow this to benefit other people by having a conversation in this forum.

So, even if I get a solution (which I didn't), it would be up to me to copy whatever conversation I have with "some other group"TM back to this forum.

SSDD

Hi Nikhar_K,

I wanted to jump in because I see too many of these sort of replies from Microsoft Employees (I'm assuming you are employed by Microsoft?)

1) Why does the user need to go through a feed-back hub if the problem was stated in this forum, with a reply from a "Microsoft Agent | Moderator"

Hey guys,

I take it from the recent messages that they haven't fixed this in the July cumulative updates?

I gave up on waiting and have been using full Hyper-V virtual machines instead (which is also a free feature in Windows 10 Pro). They have a Quick Create feature which makes it almost as easy to get up and running as Sandbox, just takes longer initially because you have to wait for it to download the full install image and go through the Windows setup.

Apart from initial setup time and disk space though (takes about 20GB for a clean install with updates, but disks are dynamically expanding so you don't have to reserve free space), it's actually a lot better than Sandbox because you can take checkpoints whenever you want. So you could configure a fresh install the way you like, set a checkpoint, then revert to that checkpoint every time you finish using it (similar to reverting to a clean slate every time you close Sandbox). But you don't HAVE to revert to a clean slate every time you close it, unlike Sandbox.

So in a sense I'm actually thankful there was this issue with Sandbox or I would have never discovered Hyper-V!

--

Regarding unhelpful/canned responses from Microsoft, I share your frustration and certainly think they can improve their ability to internally escalate real issues, but I think realistically it is probably a tough ask to expect them to handle all issues as well as we'd like given how complex the product is and how many customers they have asking questions on all sorts of esoteric issues.

I get the sense that these forums in particular are more aimed at your general non-technical user, and not so as equipped to deal with more niche/technical features or issues. I'm guessing from Nikhar_K's response that he is probably not very familiar with Sandbox and had thought it was more of a current limitation / feature request rather than a bug.

Or maybe I'm just feeling a bit more generous towards Microsoft right now because I really am quite chuffed they've made Hyper-V available in Windows 10, and so easy to get started with VMs (it was my first time dealing with VMs and I got the hang of it pretty quickly)!

David

Hey guys,

I take it from the recent messages that they haven't fixed this in the July cumulative updates?

I gave up on waiting and have been using full Hyper-V virtual machines instead (which is also a free feature in Windows 10 Pro). They have a Quick Create feature which makes it almost as easy to get up and running as Sandbox, just takes longer initially because you have to wait for it to download the full install image and go through the Windows setup.

David,

You take it correctly, I can only run Sandbox on a few of my computers.

The biggest problem with full virtual machines is that if you are going to keep them around for a long time, they have to have their own license.  You can create Windows 10 virtual machines at will, but they will either be "evaluation" versions that expire or they will be "unactivated" versions of Windows which, means they will constantly bug you about not be activated.  The big benefit of the sandbox was that it would ride on your existing Windows 10 license and not require a new license.

It's understandable why they do this, but I don't have to like it.

Scott

It's working out of the box in 1903 (OS Build 18362.356)

Confirmed, I can run PowerShell in Sandbox now as well.  Now if they could just let me configure it to pre-install some software...