{"id":17838,"date":"2008-12-14T08:03:35","date_gmt":"2008-12-14T16:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/?p=17838"},"modified":"2019-06-07T10:55:05","modified_gmt":"2019-06-07T18:55:05","slug":"what-the-heck-is-an-enum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/what-the-heck-is-an-enum\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Heck is an ENUM?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my latest post Explore your [Environment]<\/a> I said the following:<\/p>\n

PS> [System.Environment+SpecialFolder]<\/strong><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

IsPublic IsSerial Name                                     BaseType
——– ——– —-                                     ——–
False    True     SpecialFolder                            System.Enum<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

Notice that it is an ENUM.  The great things about ENUMS is that when you specify an invalid value – it tells you what the valid values are:<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

One of the comments made me realize that a lot of people will have no idea what I’m talking about so I thought I would spend a minute explaining.  <\/p>\n

ENUM is short for ENUMERATION.  In .NET, ENUM is a base class for a set of named constants.  You can think of it as a set of strings (that is not entirely accurate but for our purposes – it is a perfect explanation.   So when you see that something takes an ENUM, what it means is that it doesn’t just take any old string – it takes one of a set of strings.  <\/p>\n

What is that set of string? – That’s the beauty of an ENUM, it will tell it.  All you have to do is to provide a wrong value and it will tell you what the right values are.<\/p>\n

Enjoy<\/font><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Windows Management Partner Architect
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at:    http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/PowerShell<\/a>
Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at:  http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/technet\/scriptcenter\/hubs\/msh.mspx<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my latest post Explore your [Environment] I said the following: PS> [System.Environment+SpecialFolder] IsPublic IsSerial Name                                     BaseType ——– ——– —-                                     ——– False    True     SpecialFolder                            System.Enum Notice that it is an ENUM.  The great things about ENUMS is that when you specify an invalid value – it tells you what the valid values are: One of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13641,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[158,4,325],"class_list":["post-17838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-powershell","tag-enum","tag-howto","tag-system-environment"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

In my latest post Explore your [Environment] I said the following: PS> [System.Environment+SpecialFolder] IsPublic IsSerial Name                                     BaseType ——– ——– —-                                     ——– False    True     SpecialFolder                            System.Enum Notice that it is an ENUM.  The great things about ENUMS is that when you specify an invalid value – it tells you what the valid values are: One of […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}