Sometimes you may stumble across URLs like this one:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=13517
As it turns out, these are just "pointers" to the real web address. In PowerShell 3.0, the new cmdlet Invoke-WebRequest can resolve these URLs and return the real address that it points to:
$URLRaw = 'http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=135173' (Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $URLRaw -MaximumRedirection 0 -ErrorAction Ignore).Headers.Location
