Table of contents for Intro to PowerShell

  1. Getting PowerShell
  2. Basic PowerShell Concepts
  3. Commonly Used Cmdlets
  4. PowerShell Scripts and Profiles
  5. Using PowerShell types with commands and variables
  6. Error handling in PowerShell scripts
  7. Calling static methods
  8. $NestedPromptLevel
  9. Prompts in PowerShell


When executing a command in PowerShell that expects a non-string argument, sometimes you need to specify more than just the string representation of the parameter.  Here is an example using dates.

PS> 2007-03
2004
PS> [DateTime]"2007-03"

Monday, March 01, 2007 12:00:00 AM

PS> [DateTime]::Parse("2007-03")
Monday, March 01, 2007 12:00:00 AM

You can also set the type of a variable as you assign a value to it:

PS> $x = 2007-03
PS> $x
2004
PS> [DateTime]$x = "2007-03"
PS> $x

Monday, March 01, 2007 12:00:00 AM

Note that when you use the type in front of the value or the variable that you must also specify the value in quotes.  That syntax is, in fact, a shortcut for calling the Parse static method on the type to convert a string to that type.

When specifying a date for a cmdlet parameter whose type is DateTime, no such extra work is necessary as PowerShell will automatically call the DateTime.Parse() method on the value.

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