Vista - discovering the type of an object

I have written a small function that is helping me to discover the types of
PowerShell objects.

function WhatTypeIs($obj) {
$obj.GetType() | fl UnderlyingSystemType, BaseType
}

Is there a better way to write that function?

PS> $x = New-Object system.xml.xmldocument
PS> WhatTypeIs $x

UnderlyingSystemType : System.Xml.XmlDocument
BaseType : System.Xml.XmlNode

PS>

Depends what you wanna know of the object and the corresponding type info.
Everthing in PowerShell is an object and has a (hidden) PSObject property to
discover more interesting things.

Below I define an XML Document object and show ALL the superclasses of the
object, upto System.Object.

PS> $x = New-Object system.xml.xmldocument
PS> $x.psobject.TypeNames
System.Xml.XmlDocument
System.Xml.XmlNode
System.Object



"Larry__Weiss" <lfw@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23ssNlx4CKHA.4376@xxxxxx

I have the following function in my $profile just to see what types are at
the end of the pipe:

PS> function Get-Type {$input | %{$_.gettype()} | select name, fullname,
basetype -unique}
PS>

PS> dir | Get-Type | ft -AutoSize

Name FullName BaseType
---- -------- --------
DirectoryInfo System.IO.DirectoryInfo System.IO.FileSystemInfo
FileInfo System.IO.FileInfo System.IO.FileSystemInfo

PS>


"Larry__Weiss" <lfw@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23ssNlx4CKHA.4376@xxxxxx