Add a PipelineStopToken cancellation token property to PSCmdlet

[SeeminglyScience]

Summary of the new feature / enhancement

A common pattern for binary cmdlets is to create a cancellation token source that is then cancelled in PSCmdlet.StopProcessing().

This is a very useful pattern to enable cancelling a method that takes CancellationToken without having to poll for completion. Having this available by default would reduce a lot of boilerplate in binary cmdlets. Boilerplate example:

namespace MyModule;

[Cmdlet(VerbsDiagnostic.Test, "MyCommand")]
public class TestMyCommand : PSCmdlet, IDisposable
{
    private readonly CancellationTokenSource _stopping = new();

    protected override void ProcessRecord()
    {
        try
        {
            Task.Delay(2000, _stopping.Token).GetAwaiter().GetResult();
        }
        catch (OperationCancelledException)
        {
            throw new PipelineStoppedException();
        }
    }

    protected override void StopProcessing() => _stopping.Cancel();

    public void Dispose() => _stopping.Dispose();
}

This pattern is not possible in PowerShell directly, instead a script must poll a task for completion if it wants to respect pipeline stops. Polling example:

$task = [System.Threading.Tasks.Task]::Delay(2000)
while (-not $task.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(200)) { }
$null = $task.GetAwaiter().GetResult();

Even then all you can do is honor pipeline stops, you can't request cancellation of the work being done in another thread.

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

namespace System.Management.Automation;

public abstract class PSCmdlet
{
+   private CancellationTokenSource? _pipelineStopTokenSource;

+   public CancellationToken PipelineStopToken => (_pipelineStopTokenSource ??= new()).Token;

    protected virtual void StopProcessing()
    {
        using (PSTransactionManager.GetEngineProtectionScope())
        {
+           _pipelineStopTokenSource?.Cancel();
        }
    }

    internal void InternalDispose(bool isDisposing)
    {
        _myInvocation = null;
        _state = null;
        _commandInfo = null;
        _context = null;
+       _pipelineStopTokenSource?.Dispose();
+       _pipelineStopTokenSource = null;
    }
}

[SeeminglyScience]

The engine WG discussed this and agrees that it would be useful. An RFC would be required as we could not unanimously agree to the proposal above.

[iSazonov]

If it is for binary cmdlets only, the public CancellationToken PipelineStopToken should be not public but protected?

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This issue has not had any activity in 6 months, if this is a bug please try to reproduce on the latest version of PowerShell and reopen a new issue and reference this issue if this is still a blocker for you.

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This issue has been marked as "No Activity" as there has been no activity for 6 months. It has been closed for housekeeping purposes.

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[jborean93]

RFC to hopefully move forward with this request PowerShell/PowerShell-RFC#382. I've also opened a PR showing the PoC of the proposed approach #24620.