WindowsCapability -and WindowsPackage

Windows Capabilities and Windows Packages have extremely long names. Most of us have gotten quite good and guessing what they are

To get a list of all Windows Packages that are Installed (or Superseded) on your computer, simply run the following command in PowerShell

(Get-WindowsPackage -Online).PackageName
(Get-WindowsCapability -Online).Name

Here are some examples that were returned on my system

Microsoft-Windows-Client-LanguagePack-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~10.0.19041.746
Microsoft-Windows-LanguageFeatures-Handwriting-en-us-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.19041.1
Microsoft-Windows-TabletPCMath-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.19041.746
Microsoft-Windows-WordPad-FoD-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~10.0.19041.1
Package_for_RollupFix~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~19041.685.1.6

Tilde Delimitator

While the long name may be a challenge to read as a complete string, you can separate each of the Windows Packages or Windows Capabilities with a Tilde. Like this:

"Microsoft-Windows-Client-LanguagePack-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~10.0.19041.746" -split "~"

Microsoft-Windows-Client-LanguagePack-Package
31bf3856ad364e35
amd64
en-US
10.0.19041.746

That's much easier to read now. Once you see the pattern, every Windows Package and Windows Capability follows the same structure

Get-MyWindowsPackage

This is a new function in the OSD Module that will split the PackageName making things easier to read. Simply run the following command (-Online is assumed if a Path is not given)

Get-MyWindowsPackage | ft

Here is a comparison of Get-WindowsPackage and Get-MyWindowsPackage

Full Details

Another cool thing you can do with Get-WindowsPackage is to give it a PackageName, and it will give you as much detail as you can handle

The same method works with Get-WindowsCapability as well

-Detail

To make things easier, Get-MyWindowsPackage and Get-MyWindowsCapability will do a foreach and get much of these details (this can take some time) by adding the -Detail parameter

Wrapping Up

Take the time to play around with the new functions and see what you can do with it

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