Want to get Windows Update status on a bunch of machines, only to discover the InstalledOn property is blank for lots of updates when you’re using Get-HotFix or querying Win32_QuickFixEngineering class with Get-WmiObject?

Turns out it’s related to PowerShell parsing the date as string to datetime object incorrectly, depending what your system locale is.

$Updates = Get-HotFix | Select-Object description,hotfixid,installedby,@{l="InstalledOn";e={[DateTime]::Parse($_.psbase.properties["installedon"].value,$([System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::GetCultureInfo("en-US")))}}
$Updates | Sort InstalledOn -Descending | Select -First 10

I like the above approach, as posted by user pyro3113, because the select expression lets you easily query remote systems using Get-HotFix or Get-WmiObject.

These two solutions use the Microsoft.Update.Session COM object. The Windows Update PowerShell Module creates the COM object on a remote host whereas the post by britv8 shows just enough to get you going executing on local host:

• Windows Update PowerShell Module
• Getting Windows Updates installation history shared by Spiceworks member britv8

Interestingly, using the below command in cmd doesn’t suffer from this data type parsing issue. It’s just spat out as is with no interpretation.

wmic qfe