At the PowerShell Deep Dive, I did a short presentation on using format and type extensions. There was a lot of demo crunched into a very short period of time. Needless to say this is a complex topic that we could spend a lot of time on. But for now, let me share my slide deck and demo scripts.
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The DeepDive-Format-Type-Extensions is pretty short. The meat of the session was in the demos which you can download here. The zip file contains a number of PS1 files but these are not intended as scripts to run. They are used by the ubiquitous Start-Demo script. You should open them in a script editor and go through them line by line. I'm hoping there are enough comments to help. Any code you try to execute to load the type extension files assumes the ps1xml files are in the current location.
In the about_format documentation, all the xml references to ‘Complex’ such as should refer to ‘Custom’ like . There is also a concerning lack of documentation on the use of this xml, only the direct usage is found in the actual ps1xml files. If anyone can find anything else ( or knows how to generate some kinda documentation ) then that would be awesome.
I encourage you to post that information online and leave a comment. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd315396.aspx. June is very responsive to getting stuff right. In fact, I see some updates online already for this topic.