Alan Renouf gave a vBrownBag presentation on Advanced PowerCLI 5.5R2 last night. During the show, he showed an interesting bit of code:

$output = "" | Select VmName, PgName
$output.VmName = "value1"
$output.PgName = "value2"

This was intriguing to me. The “proper” way to create an object with attributes is to use New-Object and pipeline it through some Add-Member commands.

$output = New-Object PSObject |
Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty VmName "value1" |
Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty PgName "value2"

That creates an excessive, and somewhat unreadable, pipeline for objects with a long list of members, especially if a member’s name is long. It’s a pretty neat trick to make your code look pretty neat.

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