Updating PowerShell help on Windows “8”

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If you are evaluating the new Hyper-V PowerShell cmdlets in the Windows “8” beta – you may have noticed that the help is a bit bare.  Here you can see what you get if you run “get-help” on the Set-VMDvdDrive cmdlet:

PowerShell help 1

Just the parameter names and nothing else.

But there are two important things to know:

  1. We do have quite detailed help available – even though this is only a beta release.
  2. It is quite easy to get the full help

All you need to do is to open an administrative PowerShell prompt and run “update-help”.  Here you can see the extra details that are available after running this command:

PowerShell help 2

You can also get access to examples after doing this:

PowerShell help 3

Personally, I find that I often look at the examples to remind myself how to use a specific cmdlet.  What makes this a bit pathetic is that half the time I am looking up examples that I wrote myself :)

Cheers,
Ben