BCDedit Wierdness from PowerShell

I've started to standardize on using PowerShell instead of a command prompt for most activities, but every once in a while I run into odd things that don't work properly from the PowerShell prompt.

Today I'm doing some development on a course and it requires me to setup a host that boots to VHD. This is actually nice for courses because students work within the VHD rather than the original host OS. In theory, you could have independent classes setup with different VHD files.

Anyway, my issue was changing the description of a boot entry in the Boot Configuration Database with BCD edit. The syntax is this:

bcdedit /set {default} description "20415 Host 1"

However, I was getting the error:

The set command specified is not valid.

When I ran it from a command line it worked. It turns out that this is due to how PowerShell processes the curly braces. In PowerShell these are special characters. So, you can run it in PowerShell, but you need to escape the curly braces with backticks like this:

bcdedit /set `{default`} description "20415 Host 1"