[jcheng]

I've hardly used it myself, but apparently Microsoft's PowerShell pipes typed objects between processes: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd347728.aspx

[vertex-four]

Actually, not between processes - all Powershell commands run in the same address space as the shell, and must be implemented in .Net. I don't think you can easily write an external process which takes a Powershell object directly as input.

[jcheng]

Thanks for the correction, that explains so much--I was picturing a lot of DCOM craziness.