If you want to get some free exposure to the VS 2008 and Office technologies, sign up for Dev Days.  It is coming to my local MS office (Denver) - details listed below.

When: Thursday, January 31, 2008 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM
Where: Marriott DTC, 4900 S. Syracuse St, Denver Colorado 80237
Registration is appreciated: Click here to register

MoW wrote up a nice post on invoking XPATH expressions.  Check it out here.  Just wanted to let the PSCX users out there know that the equivalent of MoW's

PS I:\PowerShell> Function invoke-XpathExpression ([xml]$xml,$expression) {                                             
>>   $xn = $xml.PSBase.CreateNavigator()                                                                                
>>   $xn.Evaluate($expression)                                                                                          
>> }                                                                                                                    
>>    

                                                                                                                  
PS I:\PowerShell> # Example using the function                                                                          
PS I:\PowerShell>                                                                                                       
PS I:\PowerShell> invoke-XpathExpression -xml (type gl.xml) -exp "sum(GroceryList/Item/Price)"                          
29.15                                                                                                  

in PSCX would be:

PS> Select-Xml gl.xml -xpath '/GroceryList/Item/Price' | measure value -sum


Count    : 4
Average  :
Sum      : 29.15
Maximum  :
Minimum  :
Property : Value

Note that the PSCX cmdlet Select-Xml is oriented towards "selecting" node-sets hence the name.  Unfortunately xpath expressions that don't result in node-sets will error.  No worries though because PowerShell's Measure-Object cmdlet (measure alias provided by PSCX) can compute the sum easily.

OK so that was a bit shorter but what's the big deal.  Here's the deal.  If your XML uses XML namespaces then this all gets a good bit harder to deal with yourself.  Not impossible mind you.  I have written a number of posts on handling XML that uses XML namespaces but with Select-Xml it is pretty simple.  For instance, let's tweak the XML ever so slightly:

<GroceryList xmlns="tempuri.org">
  <Item>
    <Dept>Produce</Dept>
    <Name>Orange</Name>
    <Price>3.20</Price>
  </Item>
  <Item>
    <Dept>Meat</Dept>
    <Name>Steak</Name>
    <Price>13.20</Price>
  </Item>
  <Item>
    <Dept>Produce</Dept>
    <Name>Lettuce</Name>
    <Price>1.34</Price>
  </Item>
  <Item>
    <Dept>Meat</Dept>
    <Name>Ham</Name>
    <Price>11.41</Price>
  </Item>
</GroceryList>

Note the default namespace declaration on the root element.  Now the previous XPath expressions won't work but here is all we need to do with Select-Xml to make this work:

PS> Select-Xml gl.xml -xpath '/ns:GroceryList/ns:Item/ns:Price' -Namespace "ns=tempuri.org" |
>> measure value -sum
>>

Count    : 4
Average  :
Sum      : 29.15
Maximum  :
Minimum  :
Property : Value

All we needed to do was provide the namespace and a temp prefix (ns) to use in the xpath query.  Note that the -Namespace parameter will take an array of strings that match this format: "<prefix>=<namespace>".

Woohoo!  Just got word earlier today.  I look forward to another awesome year of PowerShell adoption and just maybe v 2.0 - hopefully.