This is an interesting exercise to show the power of PowerShell’s language to explore and manipulate object models, specifically its own. You all should be familiar with Type Accelerators: The short name syntax for accessing commonly used .NET Types. An example would be [wmi] – this is the same as typing [System.Management.ManagementObject]. So, how can we find all of the current existing Type Accelerators? Well, after cracking open PowerShell with our favourite decompilation tool, Reflector, the class in question is System.Management.Automation.TypeAccelerators. Here’s what it looks like:

Interestingly, the methods that let you add and remove your own accelerators are marked Public. The Type itself is internal, but the dictionary named “userTypeAccelerators” is positively tantalizing. It looks like perhaps the team have plans to let people add their own accelerators! Then again, this is a CTP, and this may change in the future. Well, let’s see if we can finish off what the team half started

First thing we need to do is get a reference to the internal class. The C# heads amongst you will start thinking about using reflection to get your hands on the type, but actually there’s an easier way. PowerShell’s language is incredibly flexible and through sneakiness, you can use System.Type’s GetType method to invoke any public method without reverting to tricky reflection calls. First of all, lets add our own user-defined Type Accelerator which is aliased to this internal class itself:

I’ve split the Type retrieval and Add methods into two lines for brevity. The parser is actually flexible enough to understand the more pithy ([type]::gettype("System.Management.Automation.TypeAccelerators"))::Add(…).

So what do we have in CTP3?

Btw, I generated the above list with this one liner:

Have fun!