I was playing with some PowerShell and wanted to use the Out-Gridview command that is part of CTP 2.0, but when trying to us it in my script I kept getting an error message that it wasn’t supported.  This command sends output to an interactive table in a separate window, a very useful function when dealing with large amounts of data that looks pretty nasty in a text only environment.

As it turns out, many of the product PowerShell hosts that are shipped are in fact minishells (such as the SQLPS shell) and not all commandlets are available including the OGV as you might expect in a normal PowerShell console.

Rule of thumb here is always use the Powershell windows and just use initialization scripts for the functions you want.

I generally get away from having to deal with minishell issues by always running the main PS shell and including this line in my \My Documents\WindowsPowershell\Profile.ps1 file, which autoloads the registered snap-ins of the computer I happen to open my PowerShell in:

get-pssnapin -registered | add-pssnapin -passthru