PowerShell - Set Alias for Loaded Assembly

Question

I use this code to load a .Net assembly to PowerShell:

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::Load(\"System.Windows.Forms, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, Publ         


        

Answer 1

Using Joey's answer you can use this function to set "aliases" to assemblies. It basically assigns an assembly to a function with the name of the given alias you want.

function Global:Add_Assembly_Alias($STR_assembly, $alias) {

    [string]$assembly = "$STR_assembly.{0}"
    $ExecutionContext.InvokeCommand.InvokeScript(
        $ExecutionContext.InvokeCommand.NewScriptBlock("
            function Global:$alias(`$namespace) {
                [string](`"$assembly`" -f `$namespace)
            }
        ")
    )
}

E.g. if you want to assign System.Windows.Forms to wforms you would call the main function as

Add_Assembly_Alias System.Windows.Forms wforms

It generates you the function called "wforms" with namespace as argument which you can use to add new objects etc. If you want to add for example a textbox object you would just have to call

$tb = new-object (wforms TextBox)

It is not much, but I think this is as close as you can get to assign an assembly to something similar to an alias. Unfortunately I didn't manage to impelement this for the direct calls of the form

[Windows.Forms.MessageBox]::Show("Hello World!")

but I hope this still helps.

Cheers, D