With Invoke-WebRequest and Invoke-RestMethod, PowerShell 3.0 now has powerful support for downloading information from the Internet as well as communicating with Internet services. We have had a number of tips on these in the past.
Some people use Invoke-WebRequest to easily read RSS information. For example, this line is supposed to get the contents of the PowerShell team blog RSS feed:
$rss = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/rss.aspx' Invoke-RestMethod $rss | Select-Object -Property Title, Link, PubDate
As it turns out, this works, but the results are only partial. To get the complete team blog, you would have to use Invoke-WebRequest like this:
$rss = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/rss.aspx' $webpage = Invoke-WebRequest $rss $xml = [XML]$webpage.Content $xml.rss.channel.item | Select-Object -Property Title, Link, PubDate
So to use these cmdlets, you need to play with them and find out how they work. Invoke-WebRequest always retrieves the complete content from a web page, but leaves it to you to pick the data and data type you need.
