Why is powershell important

Windows PowerShell includes more than one hundred basic core cmdlets, and you can write your own cmdlets and share them with other users. Knowing how to design cmdlets and perform PowerShell scripting are in-demand skills for companies large and small throughout North America and Europe. We know installing operating system updates on a PC takes a few clicks. However, installing those updates on just a dozen laptops and the odd desktop PC in a small office can be time consuming.

Imagine how much time required to update different PCs in a couple of locations—without affecting the overall productivity of your workforce. Smart IT admins use PowerShell to script a cmdlet for a task they have to perform more than a couple of times. In addition, PowerShell providers enable you to access hard-to-access data and information. I wanted to create a clean GUI that would allow the user to open the application, click on the options via a clean button menu.

I was lucky because I had a clear idea about what I wanted to do, and I went about researching it and completing what I wanted to do. You can do the same very easily if you look around your home or work network. There are plenty of tasks that are begging for automation. Are you tired of manually testing your network devices when you are having problems?

Create a scheduled Powershell task that alerts you before you have an issue! Make a text adventure game! There are tons of projects that you can get started on if you want to learn how it all works. Just look around and find something to learn how to do, and slowly apply your Powershell knowledge as it grows. Many IT administrators make the analogy of Powershell being a Swiss Army knife with a built in command line interpreter. A particularly entertaining example of some automation that I completed around 5 years ago was a morning report that had to be manually created every morning before AM.

I built a script that used another very useful tool called Selenium, which is a web based automation tester that I used for pulling web data every morning. It would take screenshots of the critical parts of the production website, and even output all the vital signs of all our infrastructure in a neat and beautiful looking report.

The report still runs from the command line to this day, and I still hit my snooze button on my alarm clock at least 2 more times than I should. You can use it in conjunction with powerful modules to expand the functionality of Powershell. You can create GUI applications for fancy Winforms and and make it look like a fully fledged applications. Just looking at the list above you can already see that there is a ton to learn about this programming language, and there is great news.

There are hundreds of free to use learning resources that drill down into the specifics without you needing to spend a cent. The great thing about Powershell is that it gives you a pathway to learn more advanced programming concepts. PowerShell, the PowerShell command line, and its cross platform capabilities will certainly help you to figure out some of the basics to get started.

I am a firm believer that you should be able to dive into any subject that you are interested in, make some mistakes, and get your hands dirty ion the process. There is a ton of great lessons that you can apply not only to programming, but to learning in general and enriching your work environment with cross platform tools and PowerShell scripts. This is another version of PowerShell and also has a cross platform command line. The short story is that in order to make PowerShell Core compatible and cross platform is that they have rolled back some of the functionality in order to make it work properly on Linux and Mac OS.

There are some disadvantages with this new version, mainly that some of the original Windows based functions have been deprecated and they do not work with the core versions of Powershell. This might seem like there is not much point to learning how PowerShell works, but I would argue that this is the perfect time to start learning it. Not only will you be able to apply your skills to other operating systems if you understand the basic syntax and usage of Powershell.

So generally, although there seems to be a bit of a setback with these early versions of Powershell Core, there will be enhancements that make the module a potentially universal way of scripting and creating apps on multiple platforms using a single framework.

Ultimately you will need to find a solution that not only keeps you interested, but also works for you practically. Much of what you learn through experimentation with PowerShell, PowerShell Core, and the PowerShell command line will have profound value when you get better with practice.

For example, many core PowerShell cmdlets are in a module called Microsoft. Utility module. PowerShell comes with a few dozen modules pre-installed, but you can also download thousands of other modules based on a task or product. You can find modules to manage other vendor products or even create your own.

You can find all modules installed on your computer by running Get-Module -ListAvailable. The Get-Module command finds all of the modules that have been loaded imported into your current session. The ListAvailable parameter tells Get-Module to also search for modules installed on your file system but not imported. Once you get comfortable with PowerShell, one of the most important aspects you need to learn is objects.

Everything in PowerShell is an object with properties and methods. Related: Understanding PowerShell Objects. It does something like running, jumping, blinking its eyes, or purring.

A cat object performs some action. In PowerShell, the cat object has various methods which take action to do something.

Using the cat examples from above, every cat is a cat. But a dog is an object too. We now have two types of objects. In programming, those different objects are called types. A type is a specific kind of object with a common set of properties and methods.

A cat is a type, a dog is a type, and a car is a type. Each object has a specific set of attributes and actions it can perform. If a cat can be thought of as an object with properties and methods, how do you represent that in code?

If you type the below text into your console and hit Enter, it will return the value back to you but more is happening in the background. When you hit Enter on your keyboard, PowerShell creates an object, specifically an object with a type of System. The Get-Member cmdlet is a handy command that inspects PowerShell objects.

Length is one property of a string that indicates how long the string is. You can reference the value of a property using dot notation, as shown below. You can see that PowerShell returns a value of 39 , indicating this script is 39 character problems. But, instead of just a set of alphanumeric characters, methods require you to use parentheses. With DSC, you can: Create declarative configurations and custom scripts for repeatable deployments Enforce configuration settings and report on configuration drift Deploy configuration using push or pull models Next steps Getting started Are you new to PowerShell and don't know where to start?

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