Now that I have my custom type I can use cmdlets such as Format-Table or Format-List to format its output while at the console, but it would be nice if I did not have to remember to usem the every time. Powershell uses Format.ps1xml to define how types should be formatted when their output is sent to the console and this technique can come to our rescue. If an output object exposes up to 4 properties, by default Powershell formats it as a table while objects with 5+ displayed properties are formatted as list for better readability; for example, in this first example I am selecting only four properties and Powershell prints data in a table format, while in the second example I am selecting five properties and Powershell presents then in a list: This is not always true though, for example Get-Process returns a table with 6 columns: This is because Get-Process returns a type that happens to have a custom format defined; which type is that? System.Diagnostic.Process. If we check $PSHOME and search the *.format.ps1xml files we can find that C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\DotNetTypes.format.ps1xml contains a definition for this .NET type: This is a relatively complex View definition with custom column…

Objects in Powershell do not necessarily have to have a defined type (or better, they can simply all be generic PSCustomObject) but from time to time it can be useful to use a custom type, for example to get nice TAB completion when passing those objects down the pipeline or to use custom formatting (more on this in a future post). Custom types are relatively easy to add; in essence, once we have an object ready to be returned as function output we can simply insert the type name in the TypeNames collection Here I am retrieving some properties from an Azure Sql Database, add them to a PSCustomObject and call $outObj.PSObject.TypeNames.Insert to insert a custom type name (AzSqlDatabaseSize) at index zero of the TypeNames collection. The output of commands would look like this: If I pipe the command to Get-Member instead, we can see the object type returned: Also, if I use this command in a pipeline I get TAB auto-completion: notice when I pipe the command to Where-Object (? is the shortcut) the property names suggested are exactly the ones returned by my custom type: Powershell 5 added classes support and custom types is one of the supported…

I spend a lot of time working at the Powershell console so it is common for me to type (or retype) the same command multiple times; of course I tend to not really retype the same command every time but rather use Get-History and related cmdlets to re-execute previous commands: The quickest way to re-execute a previous command is to use Invoke-History followed by the Id from Get-History: I like to use shortcuts (or aliases, as you can see from my history above 😊) so I would normally use h (Get-History) and r <id> (Invoke-History <id>). Sometimes I need to slightly modify the command before running it again, there’s an easy solution for that as well: Simply copy the CommandLine value from Get-History to the clipboard, paste it to the console and change what’s needed PSReadLine improves the history search capability, here’s a list of bound key handlers related to history management: For example, using Ctrl+R (search history backwards) I can type a part of a string (“keyhan” in this example) and PSReadLine shows the first matching command, I can either hit TAB to accept the command and run it, or use CTRL+R to cycle through other commands matching the…