Why are all properties read-only?

[halr9000]

$cdrom.ISOPath = $foo # won't work

$cdrom | set-cddrive -isopath $foo # works

Is there any reason you don't allow both methods? I don't know if that's the right thing to do, but I do see it a lot.

[admin · Accepted solution]

Making the properties writable introduces some questions around when changes are applied. If you set two properties, are they set one at a time? Do we add a method to apply the changes so you can set multiple? etc. In the end, we'd wind up having a set- cmdlet or the logical equivalent to account for those cases so we went with that path only. There's also the consideration that PowerShell provides additional platform support for cmdlets. I think in general we're going to err toward providing one path with the idea that we can always add more in the future while taking things out is difficult.

[halr9000]

Does the same thing go for methods? I was trying to figure out how to clone a VM after not seeing that support in any cmdlets. I then looked at the VM object, expecting to find a CloneVM method (as per the VI SDK docs), but no joy.

[admin]

You're correct - clone VM functionality is not in this build. Cloning a VM is just another way of creating a VM. I expect this will be part of New-VM down the road just as you can pass a Template to New-VM with this build.

The thing you could do with this build is to use Get-View to get the object which will allow you to call CloneTask.