There was a very interesting post over on the PowerShell team blog on Dynamic Binary Modules where Nigel Sharples describes how to run a cmdlet on a remote machine if you have the source code to the cmdlet and don’t want to deal with any intermediate assembly files to clean up.

I went and tried to do this straight away on my local machine without the remoting bit. I copied some cmdlet source code from MSDN. As a Systems Engineer, I haven’t written many compiled cmdlets in C# but I have edited a few for my liking and written one or two when script just wouldn’t cut it. One thing I have learned is that you always need a Snapin to register your cmdlet. So you have your namespace with a class for your snapin and then a class for each cmdlet that you create.

The bottom line here is that with dynamic modules you don’t need to create a Snapin class for your cmdlet. The only other tweak is that I used the –language parameter on Add-Type to specify CSharpVersion3 so I could use automatic properties and not have to explicitly write the getter and setter for the parameter “Name.”

[string]$code = @"
using System.Management.Automation; 

namespace SendGreetingDemo1
{

  [Cmdlet(VerbsCommunications.Send, "Greeting")]
  public class SendGreetingCommand : Cmdlet
  {
    [Parameter(Mandatory=true,Position=0)]
    public string Name {get;set;}

    protected override void ProcessRecord()
    {
      WriteObject("Hello " + Name + "!");
    }
  }
}
"@            

$assembly = (Add-Type -TypeDefinition $code `
          -Language CSharpVersion3 `
          -passthru ).Assembly
$assembly | Import-Module

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 9th, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.