When writing your own code and executing PowerShell statements, you might have noticed that the formatting changes from time to time. Cmdlets such as Get-Process display their results in a neat table, Get-ChildItem adds the parent directory to the formatted output, and so on.
PowerShell can be extended by your own custom formatting for all kinds of objects as well. This way you can set a template to be applied to, for example, all ADUser objects because you don't want the default list format. Or, you define the format for your own objects that your function returns.
Creating the formatting can be done by altering XML files, which can be exported from existing data or created new. Using the cmdlet Update-FormatData it is possible to import and apply the desired format. Prepending the custom format will allow you to override internal formatting for objects, while appending the data is useful for adding format data to new object types. These are most likely .NET types that you...