Some WMI instances can have their first method call fail and get-member not work in PowerShell V1

PowerShell Team

Due to a problem retrieving the available methods in V1 that we have worked around for the upcoming version of PowerShell, you might experience that the first method call to a WMI object fails with a message that mentions:

           Exception calling GetType() with “0” argument(s): “You cannot call a method on a null-valued expression.”

This happens when calling the first method in objects that are not in the root\cimv2 like:

           $instance=([wmiclass]”root\MyNamespace:MyObject”).CreateInstance()

           $instance.GetType()

As a PowerShell V1 workaround, a first call to GetType() can be performed to prevent the failure in other method calls.

Also, the get-member cmdlet will fail to work with the instance above with the following error message:

           Get-Member : Exception retrieving members: “Not Found “

As a PowerShell V1 workaround, you can list the properties available in the object by calling:

         $instance.PsObject.Properties | format-table Name

We apologize for the inconvenience this might cause.

Lucio Silveira [MSFT]
Software Developer Engineer
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at:    http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell
Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at:  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx 

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