I’m writing a dirty hack PowerShell provider so that I can have a reasonable base of knowledge before approaching something more work-oriented.  One component of the path the provider accepts must be an integer, so I decided to throw a terminating error if the path does not follow this rule. I also decided I’d do this so I could examine how terminating errors are handled. Something that mystifies me is the terminating error isn’t behaving as I understand it.  Here’s the code I use to throw the error:

var record = new ErrorRecord(new ArgumentException("path"), "InvalidItemIndex",
                           ErrorCategory.InvalidArgument, null);
var details = new ErrorDetails("The second element of a text file path must be an integer.");
record.ErrorDetails = details;
ThrowTerminatingError(record);

I expect that I’d see the information in the ErrorDetails property in some way, based on how the documentation is written; instead it seems like this information gets lost somewhere:

PS C:\Documents and Settings\myUsername\My Documents> get-item text:\Section1\item1
Get-Item : The second component of the path must be an integer.
At line:1 char:9
+ get-item  <<<< text:\Section1\item1
PS C:\Documents and Settings\myUsername\My Documents> $error[0].ErrorDetails -eq $null
True
PS C:\Documents and Settings\myUsername\My Documents>

Maybe it’s fixed in PowerShell v.2.0, or maybe I’m doing something wrong, but this is definitely not what I expected.