The scripter's secret weapon – tab completion

Although Get-Command is a great way to find cmdlets, the truth is that the PowerShell cmdlet names are very predictable. In fact, they're so predictable that after you've been using PowerShell for a while you won't probably turn to Get-Command very often. After you've found the noun or the set of nouns that you're working with, the powerful tab completion found in both the PowerShell console and the ISE will allow you to enter just a part of the command and press tab to cycle through the list of commands that match what you have entered. For instance, in keeping with our examples dealing with services, you could enter *-Service at the command line and press tab. You would first see Get-Service, followed by the rest of the items in the previous screenshot as you hit tab. Tab completion is a huge benefit for your scripting productivity for several reasons, such as:

In addition to being able to complete the command names, tab completion also gives suggestions for parameter names, property, and method names, and in PowerShell 3.0 and above, it gives the parameter values. The combination of tab completion improvements and IntelliSense in the ISE is so impressive that I recommend that people upgrade their development workstation to at least PowerShell 3.0, even if they are developing PowerShell code that will run in a 2.0 environment.