How it works…

Type accelerators are another form of encapsulation of .NET code in PowerShell. Recall the first recipe in this chapter, wherein we created a .NET object within PowerShell. We used the PowerShell command New-Object -TypeName System.IO.DirectoryInfo -ArgumentList '/home/ram' to get information on a home directory: we created a new instance of System.IO.DirectoryInfo and passed an argument to it. That was a lot of code to write. To accelerate this process, we could use [IO.DirectoryInfo]'/home/ram' (System is the default namespace; PowerShell will understand it without us explicitly mentioning it when calling accelerators), which outputs the same object as the former command.

With Import-Csv, on the other hand, the process is a simple conversion of data from text into name-value pairs. This is similar to using ConvertFrom-Text with a Delimiter parameter. This way, we instruct PowerShell to convert each row of text into instances of the object: the first row in the row-column structure is taken as the property name, and the rest of the rows are data. The cells are separated using a delimiter, which was a comma in the case of the CSV file.