Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK V2.28 Attempts to Restore Stability

One Step Forward, Six Steps Back for Flawed Releases

Literally millions of people download and use the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. With the retirement of the older Azure AD and MSOL modules, an obvious spike in the number of downloads occurred, all of which meant that the SDK is now a critical automation component for many Microsoft 365 tenants.

On May 10, 2025, Microsoft released V2.28 of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to the PowerShell Gallery (Figure 1). This release follows a catalog of woe since the release of V2.26 of the Graph PowerShell SDK on February 25, 2025. In an attempt to stem a cascade of bugs, Microsoft followed up by releasing V2.26.1, and V2.27 in April. It was all to no avail. In a case of one step forward, six steps back, V2.27 addressed a problem with Azure Automation but introduced the disappearing payload issue.

Disappearing Payloads

Graph API requests to create or update objects like users, groups, and policies usually include a JSON-formatted payload containing parameter values or instructions. Graph SDK cmdlets also use payloads, usually formatted as hash tables, that are passed to the underlying Graph API requests when the cmdlets run. You can see the Graph API request and payload used by an SDK cmdlet by including the Debug parameter.

Soon after the release of V2.27, developers complained that cmdlets did not pass the provided payload. An example of the problem is the inability to pass parameters when assigning licenses to user accounts with the Set-MgUserLicense cmdlet. Because license management is such an important task, this problem easily fell into the “must fix quick” category. Another example is when the payload disappears when updating an application with the Update-MgApplication cmdlet, or when creating a new calendar event with New-MgUserEvent ignores the start and end times.

Running what appears to be perfectly good code (often copied from Microsoft documentation) only to run into inexplicable failures is frustrating and annoying. A problem like this happening after a succession of flawed releases is especially worrisome because you’d expect Microsoft to have upped their game and improved software release processes.

Cautious Optimism

At this point, just a few days since the release of V2.28, I am cautiously optimistic. Microsoft is closing SDK issues in GitHub as people test the problems reported with previous releases. I have not experienced any new problems, scripts run without problems (aside from my own bugs), and everything works with PowerShell 5.1 runbooks in Azure Automation, as far as I can see (or rather, test). PowerShell V7 runbooks are still problematic and will remain so until Azure Automation supports PowerShell V7.4 in mid-June 2025.

I guess the takeaway is that V2.28 of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK seems to be as stable as V2.25. Given that Microsoft has fixed some bugs, V2.28 is likely a little better. That’s as far as I would go at this point. V2.28 is definitely worth testing in a development environment to make sure that production scripts run with.

Each installation of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK leaves a bunch of modules on your PC. When you install, make sure that you clean out old files and reboot, just to make sure that the new modules are used. To make things a little easier, I have a script to install and clean up modules on a local PC and another to update the Graph PowerShell modules used with Azure Automation.

Next Steps

I doubt that V2.28 will be perfect. New bugs will emerge, and we already know that some reported bugs are not fixed. One issue that I am tracking is where interactive sessions fail to recognize URIs when running cmdlets (including Invoke-MgGraphRequest) and respond with an “Invalid URI: The format of the URI could not be determined.” error. Running Connect-MgGraph to reconnect the session restores everything to good health, but suddenly losing the ability to run cmdlets is a disturbing problem that Microsoft needs to fix.

Overall, I’m not all that worried about seeing a few new bugs or having to wait a little longer for Microsoft to fix known issues. If you do find a bug, please take the time to report it by filing a report in GitHub. Don’t complain if things are not fixed if you don’t report the problem.

All I want is to see V2.28 resort relative stability to the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK in such a way that Microsoft 365 tenants can depend on it for day-to-day management of users, groups, licenses, devices, and other objects. That’s not too much to ask.

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