Hate Add-Member? (PowerShell's Adaptive Type System to the Rescue)

re: Hate Add-Member? (PowerShell's Adaptive Type System to the Rescue)

Shin Wu Lien — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 15:10:44 GMT

Interesting article, I would never have thought of modifying System.Object itself!

But any script that used this would no longer be portable across machines, correct? You couldn't just copy the script, you'd have to copy/edit the appropriate XML file too.

Will you add the PSAddMember() method to the XML files that come with PowerShell 2.0 by default?

Also, in other PowerShell blogs, performance tests have shown that add-member is terribly slow, so I hope some calories are being spent in PowerShell 2.0 to make that cmdlet faster (I have a script which parses log data which uses add-member, and it's as slow as a sick dog on a hot day...).

Thank You!

re: Hate Add-Member? (PowerShell's Adaptive Type System to the Rescue)

PowerShellTeam — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 18:54:20 GMT

> Will you add the PSAddMember() method to the XML files that come with PowerShell 2.0 by default?

Watch that space. I put it on the list of things to consider.

> Also, in other PowerShell blogs, performance tests have shown that add-member is terribly slow, so I hope some calories are being spent in PowerShell 2.0 to make that cmdlet faster (I have a script which parses log data which uses add-member, and it's as slow as a sick dog on a hot day...).

We've done a bunch of perf work in general. I don't know whether this was one of the scenarios that was optimized for.

jps

re: Hate Add-Member? (PowerShell's Adaptive Type System to the Rescue)

Rob Lancaster — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:11:17 GMT

I for one have numerous scripts lying round my hard drive, that use add-member to tack lots of random things onto objects - and this example will help cut the code no end.... specialy when I want to tag objects with note-properties as they flow through the pipeline.

However, I'd love to be able to construct a powershell object from scratch using a "create-object" like command...

This would save me having to use add-type and writing every thing in C# !

Keep up the good work.

re: Hate Add-Member? (PowerShell's Adaptive Type System to the Rescue)

Hal Rottenberg — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:13:54 GMT

Wow. This is really cool--almost. Man, as Shin mentions, the need to ship the XML around with the script really kills it. :(

I *really* hope you guys can improve this scenario for PS2. I would really love for add-member to be more useful.

re: Hate Add-Member? (PowerShell's Adaptive Type System to the Rescue)

karl prosser — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 06:31:09 GMT

cool to see some discussion on that, i really need to blog my libraries about this stuff. i've put a lot of time into object synethsis and transformation in PS

re: Hate Add-Member? (PowerShell's Adaptive Type System to the Rescue)

Anthony — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:21:57 GMT

Did you guys see this news from the Mono project? http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Sep-08.html

re: Hate Add-Member? (PowerShell's Adaptive Type System to the Rescue)

Per Østergaard — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 08:39:17 GMT

When I need to construct an object, I simply use this approach:

$obj="" | select Name,Address,Phone

$obj.name="blah"

And as I normally just want to add additional properties, I find this must easier or perhaps more intuitive than using add-member:

$obj=$obj| select *,NewProperty

$obj.NewProperty=456

I can even get rid of existing Properties -

$obj=$obj | select * -exclude Phone

$obj