What is that?
There is one addition in PowerShell vNext that I look really forward to. In v2 we have parser available. It makes work with PowerShell code easier. But PowerShell team haven’t stopped there. AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) is new concept (at least – to me) and it makes parsing code more interesting: instead of stream of tokens (which is still there with AST and is also more accurate than v2 precedents) we get tree of syntax: from Script to single Statement. Browsing thru that tree may be very hard at first. I tried to use view that seems natural for that kind of complex structures: Format-Custom. The problem that I went into was the fact, that each AST contains “Extent” and “Parent” property. And those properties keep whole code which makes Format-Custom lengthy and impractical. So my first step was to create .ps1xml files to make format and object themselves bit different. I hidden two properties I think are not very useful. You can still access them using psbase on each object – and that exactly the information you get if you try to access them directly. Next step I took was to create simple function that would wrap .NET call to System.Management.Automation.Language.Parser static methods (ParseInput, ParseFile) and make use of them more natural and PowerShell-ish. Then I packed it all in the module, so that I could paste it somewhere and let others use it and complain about things I did wrong (like using global scope to store tokens/ errors).
IT Pro PowerShell experience 