Topic: Reusable Code II

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.

In today’s PSMonday, we’ll jump right back into calculated properties, as we continue to create some reusable code. Last week our final addition was to use a calculated property to modify the name of a property, as can be seen below. We took its default value of “Name,” and changed it to “Process Name.”

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

Today we’ll add two more calculated properties, but before we do, let’s reformat this code a bit, so it fits better. First, we’re going to use “N” instead of Name and “E” instead of Expression, for the keys in our calculated property hash table. Second, we’ll take advantage of the commas between our  properties which allows each of them to sit on their own line. We could have put a space after each comma and left them on the same line as the first property, and it would have wrapped them for us; however, we’re about to add those other calculated properties.

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

The WorkingSet and PrivateMemorySize values are being reported in bytes. Let’s modify that, beginning with the WorkingSet property. Take a look at the newest changes, and we’ll discuss them after the example and its results.

Get-Process -Name powershell_ise |
    Select-Object -Property @{N='Process Name';E={$_.Name}},
        Description,
         Company,
        @{N='Shared Memory';E={"$([Math]::Round($_.WorkingSet / 1MB)) MB"}},
        PrivateMemorySize

Process Name      : powershell_ise
Description       : Windows PowerShell ISE
Company           : Microsoft Corporation
Shared Memory     : 420 MB
PrivateMemorySize : 405536768

As you can see in the above example, we first changed the term “WorkingSet” to “Shared Memory.” This time, however, we also modify the value it displays using the Expression key-value pair. We won’t go into this too deep, other than to say we first, divided our Working Set value by 1 MB, as we wanted to report our values in megabytes. Second, we directly accessed .NET to round our value using a Round method, and finally, we added the string “MB” to the end of the value to make it clear what measurement we’re using.

Next, we’ll add a third calculated property, but this time to the PrivateMemorySize property. This will allow it to function just like the modified WorkingSet property. As you can likely tell, I’ve used more lines than is necessary, in order that this best fits.

Get-Process -Name powershell_ise |
    Select-Object -Property @{N='Process Name';E={$_.Name}},
        Description,
        Company,
        @{N='Shared Memory';E={"$([Math]::Round($_.WorkingSet / 1MB)) MB"}},
        @{N='Private Memory Size';
            E={"$([Math]::Round($_.PrivateMemorySize / 1MB)) MB"}}

Process Name        : powershell_ise
Description         : Windows PowerShell ISE
Company             : Microsoft Corporation
Shared Memory       : 420 MB
Private Memory Size : 387 MB

Okay, let’s stop here and pick up from this point next Monday.