Recently I have been working on a big project to rewrite the PlatyPS module. This is the module we use at Microsoft to create and maintain the PowerShell documentation. As part of this project, I spent a long time fixing existing PowerShell content so that it would work with the new PlatyPS module. To celebrate the completion of this project, I decided to have some fun with Microsoft Copilot. I created this image and story about the PlatyPS module and how it helps us wrangle PowerShell documentation.

PlatyPS and Content Wrangler

Out on the wild edges of the PowerShell frontier, where modules multiplied and help files were as scarce as water in the Death Valley, there rode a man named Sean Wheeler. With a laptop in one hand and a coffee-stained cowboy hat in the other. Sean was a rare breed: part coder, part cowboy, and full-time documentarian.

His companion? A massive, bright-blue, duck-billed beast named PlatyPS.

Now, PlatyPS wasn’t some ordinary companion. No, sir. He was bred for one purpose: to wrangle PowerShell documentation. When other developers were getting bucked off by Get-Help and dragged by Update-Help, Sean and PlatyPS rode in, calm as a Sunday morning, turning chaos into clarity.

With a single command, Sean could turn complex cmdlets into clean, readable markdown:

Get-Command -Module TrailblazerTools | New-MarkdownCommandHelp -OutputFolder .\docs

Need to refresh it after a long day on the dev range?

Update-MarkdownHelp -Path .\docs

And when it was time to publish those help files for the whole PowerShell posse to use:

Import-MarkdownCommandHelp .\docs | Export-MamlCommandHelp -OutputPath .\en-US

Thanks to Sean and PlatyPS, no module went undocumented, and no parameter went unexplained. They brought law and order to the wide, wild west of scripting, one Markdown file at a time.

So if you ever find yourself knee-deep in a PowerShell module with no documentation in sight, don’t panic. Just install the legend:

Install-PSResource -Name Microsoft.PowerShell.PlatyPS

And tip your hat to Sean Wheeler, the cowboy who taught the world that good code deserves even better docs.