After my success yesterday in accessing the Common Feed Store from PowerShell, I started to wonder just how difficult it would be to write a provider for PowerShell so that I could access my feeds as if they were folders and files. You see, in PowerShell, you're not limited to hard drives and files when you use "dir", "cd" etc - you can change into the Windows Registry, or into the certificate store ... all sorts of places.

So I did some reading on MSDN about creating your own PowerShell providers.

A few hours later, and I can now do this:

 cd feed: dir -recurse | where {$_.Modified -gt [DateTime]::Now.AddMinutes(-90)} | ft Title

... which yields this output:

Title ----- Opening & Saving Word, PowerPoint and Excel 2... Niche Player No More; Apple in the running f... Where's the Cowboy Talk Now? Open Source Music Software & The AGNULA Proje... Zelda:Twilight Princess for GameCube NOT to b... Old buddies reunite in hopes of taking tech w... Fifteen Exercises for Learning a new Programm... LOST - Further Instructions Recap
 Engadget's relaunch giveaways: Slingbox PRO w...

In other words, I can list out from the command-line all the items in my feeds that have been updated in the last 90 minutes!

I'll keep working on this provider to give it more functionality. For example, right now you can't use wildcards when you type "dir", and there is no default formatting for feeds, so you need to pipe everything through to format-table to get a nice output. Still, not bad for a few hours' work!!!