PowerShell v3 – Bringing [ordered] to your hashtables

*****Warning. This is from a preview release******

When using a hashtable in PowerShell v2 the insertion order is not preserved. So I might be slightly OCD, but this bugs me:

$HashTableOld = @{a=1; b=2; c=3; d=4}

$HashTableOld

If you consider the type of the object you will see that it is of .NET type System.Collections.Hashtable

$HashTableOld | Get-Member

In PowerShell v3 it is now possible to create an ordered hashtable using the [ordered] syntax

$HashTableNew = [ordered]@{a=1; b=2; c=3; d=4}

$HashTableNew

This will create an object of .NET type System.Collections.Specialized.OrderedDictionary

$HashTableNew | Get-Member

Possibly the most significant takeaway from this change is that it came as a feature suggestion from the community. Using http://connect.microsoft.com/PowerShell anybody can submit bugs / feature requests and gather community support for them via voting them up.If you have a good idea, then suggest it  – you never know, it might make it into the product!

This feature suggestion came from Diogenus, more details can be found here.