A Smart PSDrive Provider

Posted on January 13, 2010 by Jeffery Hicks

I’ve been doing a lot with the ActiveDirectory module that ships with Windows Server 2008 R2 and which you can also use with the Remote Server Administration Tools on WIndows 7.  As I was trying things out with the PSDrive provider I discovered something very cool.

When you load the Active Directory module, it will automatically create a PSDrive called AD: which is rooted to your domain.  Or you can manually create a drive. You can call it anything you’d like.

PS C:\> new-psdrive MyCompany ActiveDirectory -Root "DC=mycompany,DC=local" -server mycompany-dc01

Now I can change to this PSDrive and navigate AD almost as if it were a file system.

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I was working on using the New-Item cmdlet to create objects in the PSdrive. Not remembering the exact syntax I decided to look at the help examples (help new-item –ex).

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I thought, well isn’t that convenient, Active Directory examples. But I wondered…I didn’t recall examples like this before.  I switched back to C: and looked at help examples again:

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What do ya know! File system examples!!  I tried this with a few other cmdlets like Get-ChildItem and Get-ACL, switching between the file system and the AD drive. When in the AD drive I got AD specific examples. How sweet is that!

But before you get carried away by the moment,   I tried this with other PSDrives like HKLM: and CERT: but with no change.  They show the same examples you get when in the file system.  I love the idea of a “smart” PSDrive provider.  So far ActiveDirectory is the only one I’ve discovered.

Not being a developer I can’t say how difficult implementing something like this is, but if you are a third party developer offering PowerShell solutions with your own provider, I hope you follow the lead of the AD team.

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5 Responses to A Smart PSDrive Provider

  1. Jeffery Hicks says:
    January 13, 2010 at 11:40 am

    Just checked the IIS provider and it isn’t smart like AD.

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  4. Chad Miller says:
    January 14, 2010 at 9:47 pm

    I believe this is an issue with how provider help was implemented V1 vs V2. In version 2 the ability to add custom provider help was added. This abiility didn’t exist in V1 (only the generic help for item cmdlets were returned regardless of which provider was used). I could be wrong, my conclusion is based on a reading of this blog post and some questions I had asked when researching creating a provider: http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2009/05/28/adding-custom-cmdlet-help-for-providers.aspx

    Now, why hasn’t the registry provider been updated in V2 to take advantage of this feature is another question — perhaps you should log a Connect Item.

    • Jeffery Hicks says:
      January 15, 2010 at 8:06 am

      Thanks for the info. I certainly suspected it was a v2 thing, which is why I was disappointed the new IIS provider didn’t support it. I’m pretty sure it is an optional feature and not necessarily a bug. And at this point I’m not sure how Microsoft will be handling bug fixes and updates to PowerShell v2.

      BTW, I also checked the SQL PSDrive provider and doesn’t offer provider specific examples.