Topic: Reusable Code I

Notice: This post is a part of the PowerShell Monday series — a group of quick and easy to read mini lessons that briefly cover beginning and intermediate PowerShell topics. As a PowerShell enthusiast, this seemed like a beneficial way to ensure those around me at work were consistently learning new things about Windows PowerShell. At some point, I decided I would share these posts here, as well. Here’s the PowerShell Monday Table of Contents.

After I type the same thing a few times, and suspect I’ll need, or want, to continue to do that, I’ll typically write a function for it, so that I never have to type it again. That’s the purpose of a function. It’s a container for a series of commands that I can run, or invoke, simply by entering its name. Today we’ll start a four-part PSMonday on how to reuse code from beginning to end. As we close up PSMonday, these last several are going to be the ones in which to really pay attention.

Let’s start by entering a simple, Get-Process command, in order to determine whether or not the PowerShell ISE — the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment — is currently running.

Get-Process -Name powershell_ise | Select-Object -Property ProcessName,Id

ProcessName      Id
-----------      --
powershell_ise 5732

In the above example, we used Select-Object to filter the properties that are returned by Get-Process. The ISE is running, otherwise we would’ve received an error, indicating that the process could not be found.

Next, let’s pipe the results of an unfiltered, Get-Process command to a mildly modified Get-Member command, and take a look at all the properties of the returned object.

Get-Process -Name powershell_ise | Get-Member -MemberType Property

Here’s another filtered Get-Process command, that only includes the properties that hold information in which I am interested.

Get-Process -Name powershell_ise |
    Select-Object -Property Name,Description,Company,WorkingSet,PrivateMemorySize

Name              : powershell_ise
Description       : Windows PowerShell ISE
Company           : Microsoft Corporation
WorkingSet        : 162627584
PrivateMemorySize : 153522176

Let’s make a change to the Name property using what’s called a calculated property. Among other things, a calculated property allows us to rename a property’s default name to something else.

Get-Process -Name powershell_ise |
    Select-Object -Property @{Name='Process Name';Expression={$_.Name}},Description,Company,WorkingSet,PrivateMemorySize

Process Name      : powershell_ise
Description       : Windows PowerShell ISE
Company           : Microsoft Corporation
WorkingSet        : 162324480
PrivateMemorySize : 153812992

The calculated property looks like this, when it’s all by itself.

@{Name='Process Name';Expression={$_.Name}}

Notice in the above results that Name property is now named, Process Name. The calculated property consists of a hash table, as signified by @{}, that contains two, key-value pairs. One pair includes the Name key, and the second key-value pair includes an Expression key. We’ll continue next week with some additional examples of calculated properties, as we continue to learn about creating reusable code.