Type accelerators

A type accelerator is an alias for a type. At the beginning of this chapter, the System.Management.Automation.PowerShell type was used; this type has an accelerator available. The name of the type accelerator is simply PowerShell. The type accelerator allows the following to be used:

[PowerShell].Assembly

Another commonly used example is the ADSI accelerator. This represents the System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry type. This means that the following two commands are equivalent:

[System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry]"WinNT://$env:COMPUTERNAME"
[ADSI]"WinNT://$env:COMPUTERNAME"

The full type name behind a type accelerator can be seen using the FullName property:

PS> [ADSI].FullName
System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry

PowerShell includes a lot of type accelerators; these accelerators are documented in about_Type_Accelerators:

Get-Help about_Type_Accelerators

Getting and adding type accelerators in code is explored later in this...