Weird [type] behavior differences between powershell, pwsh, and powershell_ise

Question

Please forgive the cross posting between reddit.com/r/PowerShell and here.

Up until a few days ago the behavior of using [type] and a particular typename was consistent between powershell.exe, pwsh.exe, and powershell_ise.exe. Now it is different and I haven't made any user initiated changes.

I've tried specifying -noprofile at the command line and the same erroneous behavior. Below is some sample command output between the different incarnations of PowerShell.

(PSv5) C:\Users>  [System.Windows.WindowState]
Unable to find type [System.Windows.WindowState].
At line:1 char:1
+ [System.Windows.WindowState]
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidOperation: (System.Windows.WindowState:TypeName) [], RuntimeException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : TypeNotFound

(PSv7) C:\Users>  [System.Windows.WindowState]
InvalidOperation: Unable to find type [System.Windows.WindowState].

(PS_ISEv5) C:\Users>  [System.Windows.WindowState]

IsPublic IsSerial Name                                     BaseType
-------- -------- ----                                     --------
True     True     WindowState                              System.Enum

Note how (PS_ISEv5) is the only one providing the expected result.

I'm at a loss as to where to dig deeper to find root cause. My Google-Fu is not providing any insight. Anyone have any breadcrumbs to point me in the right direction?

I tried loading powershell.exe and pwsh.exe with -noprofile and the behavior was the same. I've attempted to search on Google and nothing useful was returned.

Answer 1

You could load the PresentationFramework assembly yourself:

[Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("PresentationFramework")

or

Add-Type -AssemblyName "PresentationFramework"

It makes sense that this WPF assembly is already loaded in the PowerShell ISE GUI application.