This morning I did a little exercise.  Because PowerShell does not have C#'s Using Statement, Class references have to be fully qualified.  This includes Enumeration Values.  IMHO, this can make calls to managed methods a bit wordy.

In order to manage this, I have at times initialized a hash table with enumeration values.  For example, to initialize the values of System.Security.Cryptography.CipherMode I would create the following.

---

$CipherMode = @{}
$CipherMode.OFB = [System.Security.Cryptography.CipherMode]::OFB
$CipherMode.CFB = [System.Security.Cryptography.CipherMode]::CFB
$CipherMode.CBC = [System.Security.Cryptography.CipherMode]::CBC
$CipherMode.ECB = [System.Security.Cryptography.CipherMode]::ECB
$CipherMode.CTS = [System.Security.Cryptography.CipherMode]::CTS

---

This allows use of $CipherMode.CBC instead of [System.Security.Cryptography.CipherMode]::CBC.  While I found this handy at times, it is arduous to initialize.  And this one only has 5 values.

I developed a couple of functions that take the drudgery out of it.  The usage is:

---

$CipherMode = Get-EnumValues "System.Security.Cryptography.CipherMode"

---

This as easily handles enumeration of 2 or 200.  Beauty!

I also made a helper function that will simply show me the enumeration names:

Get-EnumNames "System.Security.Cryptography.CipherMode"

This will return:

CBC
ECB
OFB
CFB
CTS

---

The Source Code is as follows:

---

function Get-ValidEnumClass ([string] $ClassName = ${Throw "Class Name is required"})
{
  $type = [System.Type]::GetType($ClassName)
  if ($type -eq $null)
  {
    throw "Invalid Class Name or Assembly not loaded for [$ClassName]"
  }
  if (!$type.IsEnum)
  {
    throw "Invalid Enum Class [$ClassName]"
  }
  $type
}

function Get-EnumNames ($EnumClass = ${Throw "Valid Enum Class Name or Type is required"})
{
  if ($EnumClass -is [string])
  {
    $EnumClass = Get-ValidEnumClass $EnumClass
  }
  [System.Enum]::GetNames($EnumClass)
}

function Get-EnumValues ([string] $EnumClassName = ${Throw "Valid Enum Class Name is required"})
{
  $type = Get-ValidEnumClass $EnumClassName
  $enumNames = Get-EnumNames $type
  $values = @{}
 
  foreach ($name in $enumNames)
  {
    $values[$name] = $type::$name.GetHashCode()
  }
  $values
}