From its inception, PowerShell has gone out of its way to shield the scripters and operators from having to know and understand the underlying .NET structures. Implicit conversion, on-the-fly type changes, output formatting buried deep in .ps1xml files help with that - you can spend a decade scripting and be successful in automating your IT processes without knowing much about the objects and data types being used under the hood.

There are, however, developers coming to PowerShell not from operations but from strongly typed languages like C++, C# or Delphi. These folks are very vocal about typing everything, even in PowerShell, and often push for declaring explicit type declarations "best practice". PowerShell, being what it is, is happy to oblige. Or is it?

In this session, we will explore the most prominent use cases that seem to call for strong typing, the benefits, caveats and idiosyncracies that go with them. We will ask ourselves whether the perceived benefits are worth the reduced readability and increased file size. We will also examine the performance aspect of strong typing at scale.