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Let's jump into the PowerShell console and explore some of those

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concepts we just covered in the last clip.

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First up, if you recall in the formatting workflow diagram,

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if we have an object that's a string,

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Out‑Default will just pipe it straight to Out‑Host.

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Let me create a string here with a variable of $mystring,

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and I'll just put the value as This is a string of text.

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Nothing too exciting.

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If I grab $mystring and pipe that to Get‑Member and just scroll up there,

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we can see the type of object here is indeed System.String.

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If I just run $mystring,

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we get the value of that string output back on the screen.

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Behind the scenes here, that is going to Out‑Default and Out‑Host.

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If I pipe it to one of the format commands,

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like Format‑Table, normally you'd expect to see a table as the output,

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but because this is just a string and not an object with properties,

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there's nothing to format in a table.

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And just to prove that point further, same deal with Format‑List.

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We'll look more at Format‑List and Format‑Table in the upcoming clips.

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Now remember I mentioned,

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every time you run a command it gets output to Out‑Default,

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which will then, by default, pipe it to Out‑Host.

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Let's run a command like Get‑NetAdapter,

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and this will list the network adapters on the machine.

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By default, this type of object gets formatted as a table.

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You can pipe that to Out‑Default, and you get exactly the same thing,

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because that actually happened anyway when we ran it the first time,

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you just didn't see it.

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And finally, we can also explicitly pipe that to Out‑Host,

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but again, you will get exactly the same thing,

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because even though you didn't see it,

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Out‑Host was added on the end of the previous two

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commands by PowerShell automatically.

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Let's take a look at how the formatting data works

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that I mentioned in the last clip.

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If I run Get‑Process, the default formatting is a table.

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If I scroll up, you can see the table headers there,

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and take note of these table headers,

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especially things like this K and M in the brackets there.

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If I run Get‑Process again and pipe it to Get‑Member,

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and I'm just going to pipe that to the more command so

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it doesn't escape off the screen,

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here we can see the type name for this object is System.Diagnostics.Process.

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I'm going to highlight that and copy it to my clipboard using

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Ctrl+C because I want to use that again in a moment.

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One of the cmdlets I briefly introduced in the last clip was Get‑FormatData,

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which allows us to explore some of the default formatting

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rules PowerShell has in its system.

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Let's explore that by running Get‑FormatData with no parameters at all.

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The list we get back is of all the different types of objects that

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PowerShell has some specific formatting instructions for.

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We can narrow this down by specifying the object type.

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So, I'll run Get‑FormatData again, and this time use the TypeName parameter,

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and then press Ctrl+V to paste in the process object

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that I copied a few moments ago.

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One of the tips that you'll see if you dig into the help for Get‑FormatData

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is to always include the PowerShell version parameter with the value as 5.1

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when using a local invocation of Get‑FormatData.

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The result we get back here indicates there are several different

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FormatViewDefinitions for the System.Diagnostics.Process object type.

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Let me up arrow to get that back,

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and then I'll press the Home button to go to the start of the command,

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and I'm going to put that in a variable named $formatdata.

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We can then run $formatdata.FormatViewDefinition to

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look at the values of that property,

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and we can see the four different ViewDefinitions,

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three of which are specified as TableControl and one of

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which is specified as WideControl.

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If I run that again and then get the first object

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and look at the control property,

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this is now getting down into the nitty‑gritty of that first definition,

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and we can start to see properties like headers,

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rows, so on, and so forth.

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If I up arrow to get that last command back and then

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check out the Headers property,

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you'll notice we're now listing the values of the headers that

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are going to be in the formatted output,

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as well as some of the format instructions like how many pixels wide will it be,

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and what's the alignment going to be, that sort of thing.

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Remember when we ran Get‑Process a minute ago, these were the headings for

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the table columns that were displayed on our screen.

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We could keep digging around in the console here,

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but all of this information can be exported to XML,

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which, and I thought I'd never say this,

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can be a little bit easier to read.

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Let me just create a new folder in C:\Docs by running New‑Item,

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and I'll set the type to a Directory.

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Let's again run Get‑FormatData, and we'll specify the TypeName parameter,

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and I'll paste the value that's still on my clipboard,

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and we'll specify the PowerShell version.

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From there, we can pipe that across to Export‑FormatData,

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specify the path as C:\Docs/process.xml.

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Now you are meant to export these as ps1 XMLs,

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but plain old XML will work fine just for our purpose here.

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And then there's a parameter to include the script block,

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which it isn't done by default,

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but I know this view uses them and I want to show you those,

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so I'm going to include it.

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Okay, awesome, let's crack open that file in Notepad,

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and let me just make that full screen,

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and I'll bump up the font size here so we can actually see this as well.

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What we're looking at here are the formatting ViewDefinitions in XML format

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that PowerShell will use for the process object type.

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So we can see at the top here that this first view

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that's defined is named process.

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And then it starts defining the formatting information for how

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that table should be constructed by PowerShell.

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If I scroll down a little bit,

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we can see here that there are script blocks included for the table columns.

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So on the fly, when PowerShell is formatting this data,

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it is also taking these raw properties of each object like PM and

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WS, and then dividing them by 1MB to manipulate the output we end

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up getting shown by PowerShell.

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So the person that created this view is going to a lot of effort for us to

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modify and present the data to make it nicer to read by default.

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This does also highlight something to be aware of.

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Sometimes when you run a command,

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you'll see a heading in the output that isn't actually

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the name of an underlying property,

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and that's because the view is formatting it differently.

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Occasionally, you'll try and do something with that

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sub‑property with the name that you see in the output,

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only to find that it's not actually the name of the underlying property.

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So if you ever get into that situation,

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make sure you pipe the command to Get‑Member,

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and that will show you the actual property names of the object.

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Okay,

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now, let's jump back to the PowerShell console and take a look

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at an example of what PowerShell does when there are no

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formatting rules for an object type.

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I'm going to run Test‑NetConnection, and I'm going to specify the ComputerName,

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which is really just a target, as www.google.com.

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And I'm going to test if I can connect to google.com on the common port of HTTP.

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The result comes back okay there, and I can see that that's come back as a list,

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and we're looking at six properties in total.

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Let's pipe that across to Get‑Member, and if I scroll up a touch,

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the TypeName is Test‑NetConnectionResult.

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As far as I'm aware,

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there's no formatting rule for that type, so this is where

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if there are four properties or less, PowerShell will do a table,

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but if there are five or more, it will do a list.

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Let's test out that theory by running the command again,

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but this time I'm going to pipe it to Select‑Object

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to select specific properties.

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I'll pick the ComputerName, the RemoteAddress,

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the RemotePort and the SourceAddress.

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What do you think is going to happen here?

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If you think that we'll get a table as a result, you are absolutely correct.

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Let me up arrow to get that last command back,

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and then I'm going to add a fifth property.

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I'll choose PingSucceeded.

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What do you think is going to happen now?

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If you thought it will format as a list, then again, you are spot on.

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We can override the formatting system as well.

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So,

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if I press the up arrow again to get that command back

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that's selecting five properties, so by default this is a list,

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I can explicitly pipe that to Format‑Table to tell

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PowerShell that I definitely want a table,

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and because I've overridden the formatting system, I'll get the table as an output, which is exactly what I wanted.