Simplify Creating Items with PowerShell Providers

re: Simplify Creating Items with PowerShell Providers

Mike Hammond — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:01:36 GMT

So glad to see this post, because it tickles a pet peeve of mine with PowerShell. New-Item takes an ItemType parameter, which identifies what kind of thing you want the provider to create. But it seems like you are at the mercy of the docmentation for that provider to tell you what the list of allowed ItemTypes may be. If that documentation is incomplete or difficult to locate, you're stuck. Can we hope that there will ever be support for some way to ask a PSProvider to identify what item types it's designed to create?

re: Simplify Creating Items with PowerShell Providers

Ed Wilson — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:25:13 GMT

@Klaus you are right. The PowerShell provider system is really cool, and it does take some getting used to. Keep in mind, that when creating aliases, or variables, we DO have additional cmdlets with parameters that are more customized to the specific provider. For me, because I understand the underlying provider, I enjoy the ability to use the more generic cmdlets. When working with the Registry, I love using the item and itemproperty cmdlets ... but I know some people who find the concepts so foreign, they resort to using .NET framework cmdlets, VBScript type COM objects, or even WMI classes. This is a shame, because in each case the orders of complexity increase.

re: Simplify creating items with PowerShell providers

Klaus Schulte — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 08:49:14 GMT

Hi Ed,

the powershell provider system is really a great deal!

But it is something that is so different from the traditional approaches that use seperate commands to navigate each "subsystem". It is really hard for somebody like me to deal with these more abstract "items" and to remember if I have to use e.g. the "itemType" parameter which is sometimes required and sometimes not.

In fact I have to know the underlying provider in order to be able to supply parameters that are meaningful to it. And I sometimes get lost in the world of "Items" and "ItemProperties" ( especially if the provider is the registry)

I still can live with commands like "set", "md", "rd" ...

So ... it may take some time to get used to the new ( and it is excellent for sure ) provider system ...

Klaus.