PowerShell

One of PowerShell’s most powerful and defining features is that it is built directly on the .NET runtime. This isn’t just a superficial connection; PowerShell’s engine, its cmdlets, and the data that flows through its pipeline are all .NET objects. This deep integration gives PowerShell a “superpower”: the ability to directly and seamlessly access the vast ecosystem of .NET classes and methods. This guide walks through how this relationship works and how I leverage .NET to write incredibly powerful and flexible scripts, turning PowerShell into a full-fledged .NET scripting language. ...

What truly sets PowerShell apart from traditional command-line shells like Bash or Zsh is its foundational design: it’s built around objects, not text. While other shells pass streams of text between commands, PowerShell passes rich, structured objects. This fundamental difference is PowerShell’s superpower, making it an incredibly efficient and robust tool for automation, data processing, and system administration. This guide explores what it means to work with objects and how I leverage the object-oriented pipeline to write cleaner, more powerful, and more reliable scripts. ...

PowerShell has evolved significantly over the years, and with the release of PowerShell 7, it introduced several modern operators that make scripting more efficient, readable, and aligned with other popular programming languages like C# and JavaScript. This guide provides a deep dive into these new operators, showing how I use them to simplify my code and make my scripts more robust. The key operators I’ll cover are: && and || — Pipeline chain operators ?? and ??= — Null-coalescing operators ?: — Ternary operator 1. Conditional Execution: The Pipeline Chain Operators (&& and ||) Introduced: PowerShell 7.0 ...

Querying Active Directory (AD) is a fundamental task for any Windows administrator. Whether I need to generate a report, audit user accounts, or automate a task, PowerShell’s Get-ADUser cmdlet is the most powerful and flexible tool for the job. This guide will walk through everything I learned to get started with Get-ADUser, from basic queries to advanced filtering and exporting results to a CSV file. Prerequisites Before I can use Get-ADUser, I need to have the Active Directory module for PowerShell installed. This is part of the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT). ...