Makes PowerShell Usage Explicit

[jonathansampson]

Motivation and Context

It may not be clear to some readers that many of the commands intended for Windows are also intended for a PowerShell context, rather than a more traditional cmd.exe context. As such, it would be good to explicitly inform the user that PowerShell is the intended execution environment.

How Has This Been Tested?

Yes

Breaking Changes

No

Types of changes

• Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
• New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)
• Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to change)
• Documentation update

Checklist

• I have read the MCP Documentation
• My code follows the repository's style guidelines
• New and existing tests pass locally
• I have added appropriate error handling
• I have added or updated documentation as needed

[jspahrsummers]

Thanks for the suggestion! I agree with the premise, but I wonder if there's some other way we can indicate it rather than qualifying "Windows" everywhere we mention the platform.

A couple of spitball ideas:

1. Could we check for the presence of PowerShell programmatically? e.g., look for $PSVersionTable?
2. Could we note that it's PowerShell in an inline comment?
3. Or, maybe we just add a natural language blurb to each of these excerpts (e.g., in a preceding paragraph) that explains

What do you think?

[jonathansampson]

@jspahrsummers Can you elaborate on your first suggestion (i.e., checking for the presence of powershell)? My proposal is simply to make the instances of PowerShell code in the documentation more explicitly identified as such, so as to avoid confusion where the reader attempts to execute a PowerShell command in a cmd.exe environment. I also considered inline comments; I'll submit a commit with that route instead.

[jspahrsummers]

Can you elaborate on your first suggestion (i.e., checking for the presence of powershell)?

The idea (only half-thought-through) was to place some executable marker into the snippets that would identify if the user is running the excerpt in cmd, and suggest the use of PowerShell instead.

This might be overkill, or too verbose, or unworkable for other reasons—so TIOLI 🙂 I'm also totally happy just annotating each of these.