About snap-ins

Snap-ins, and the commands for interacting with snap-ins, are only available in Windows PowerShell; they are not present in PowerShell 7 and the commands used below will not work.

A snap-in is the predecessor to a module. It was the mechanism available to extend the set of commands in PowerShell 1 and was deprecated with the release of PowerShell 2. Unfortunately, a small number of organizations persist in offering PowerShell commands via a snap-in.

The list of installed snap-ins may be viewed using the following command:

Get-PSSnapIn -Registered

If the Registered parameter is excluded, Get-PSSnapIn will show the snap-ins that have been imported into the current PowerShell session.

PowerShell does not automatically load commands from a snap-in. All snap-ins must be explicitly imported using the Add-PSSnapIn command:

Add-PSSnapIn WDeploySnapin3.0

Once a snap-in has been installed (registered) and added, Get-Command can be used to list the...