Has there been updates to transcription support in a PS 4 Windows Update? Behaviour has changed...

Question

I utilise PowerShell transcription support heavily in my PS scripts. Essentially I utilise transcription as a replacement to having a logging framework - all logging is performed via Write-Host, Write-Verbose and Write-Debug calls, and then logged to file
via a call to Start-Transcript at the start of script execution.
Transcription support in PS versions prior to 5 is limited in that it is hard coded in the Start-Transcript and Stop-Transcript commands to throw an exception if the host is not an instance of Microsoft.PowerShell.ConsoleHost. Also, to make it even more difficult,
Stop-Transcript throws an error when there is no active transcript; but there is no way to detect if there is. Therefore, I use reflection to get the ConsoleHost.IsTranscribing internal property value to determine whether to call Stop-Transcript at script
completion. This logic has worked fine for PS versions 2, 3 and 4. However, more recently I believe a Windows Update patch has changed the way the transcription works. It appears that PS 4 now supports transcription functionality that I thought was PS 5 (CTP)
specific - nested transcription sessions (i.e. you can now continually call Start-Transcript and it will create more sessions, rather than throw an error when there is an active session).  Also, the internals of how transcription is managed must have
changed because the IsTranscribing property no longer returns the correct value. I am unsure if there is now a "supported" way of checking for this rather than hacking into the internals of the host. This change results in my script creating multiple
transcription sessions as it does not know there is already transcription started.
Does anyone know if there has been any updates in PS 4 for the transcription functionality? Or any other details regarding this?
Cheers

Answer 1

Hi Anna,
Thanks for the response. Can you make sense of the info below? Transcription appears completely broken
on the build on my machine, which I have not installed any PS CTP on. I am worried a hotfix such as KB3000850 which has also caused me the grief here:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/eaa4a532-5ff5-4a2f-89ce-7e72c71a8fb7/powershell-30-stuck-in-infinite-loop-resolving-members-internally-is-this-a-ps-bug?forum=winserverpowershell
https://connect.microsoft.com/PowerShell/feedback/details/1045858/add-member-cmdlet-invokes-scriptproperty-members-when-adding-new-member
...has been installed via Windows Update. I am running Windows 8.1 and all latest updates applied as at 23 April.
My $PSVersionTable is the same as yours except for "BuildVersion" 6.3.9600.17400. I can also call Start-Transcript continually and it will keep creating sessions. Once I do this all sessions receive data once I
enter more commands in the console (i.e. each file is getting the same data). This is the behaviour I would have expected in PS 5 with the transcription updates, but not in a PS 4 update.
NOTE: In addition to this, the data being fed into the transcription file is NOT the same format as the standard transcription format. The transcription file contains different data and
is not a true reflection of what is on the console). The following data is being output to the transcription file after each command:
CurrentMatchIndex              ReplacementIndex             ReplacementLength CompletionMatches
                           -1                            
0                             8 {System.Management.Automat...
In addition to that (I haven't had a chance to look into this in detail), but the log files that are being generated by the PS module I have written are now containing a heap of contents that appear to be generated each time an exception
is thrown (even if it has been caught?)
"PS>TerminatingError(Invoke-Expression): xxxxxxx" and
"PS>TerminatingError(): "The pipeline has been stopped.""
messages, but no host, verbose, or debug data (i.e. terminating error details only, which I have never seen in the transcript file before). That's correct -
the transcription file doesn't contain any of the data it used to, just error info that did not used to be in there!!
Please assist urgently, this is a critical issue for me.