Windows Powershell Commands for Beginners

Agenda

• Introduction of Powershell
• Need of powershell
• BackGround of Powershell
• Tools
• Why its better than alternatives ?
• Top Most Administrative Powershell Commands
• Working with Pipeline
• Selecting, Sorting, Measuring, Exporting, Importing, Converting,     Filtering, Passing Data in Pipeline.
• Using PSProviders and PSDrives
• Formatting Output
• Introduction of WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation)
• Condition
• Looping (For/ Eor-each/While)
• Take user Input
• Display Output

 Introduction

• This Shell is Command line based or can be included to GUI.
• Developed by Microsoft
• Based on .Net Framework
• It includes Scripting.
• Capability to interact with another Windows based Softwares, for instances:-
• Citrix, SQL, AD, any open APIs like Slack etc.

Designed by	Jeffrey Snover, Bruce Payette, James Truher (et al.)
Developer	Microsoft
First appeared	November 14, 2006
Stable release	5.1.14393 / August 2, 2016; 8 months ago
Preview release	6.0.0 Alpha 17 / March 8, 2017; 35 days ago
Typing discipline	Strong, safe, implicit and dynamic
Platform	.NET Framework, .NET Core
OS	Windows 7 and later, macOS, CentOS, Ubuntu
Filename extensions	•.ps1 (Script) •.ps1xml (XML Document) •.psc1 (Console File) •.psd1 (Data File) •.psm1 (Script Module) •.pssc (Session Configuration File) •.cdxml (Cmdlet Definition XML Document)

What’s Need ?   

• Microsoft describes PowerShell as “a task-based command-line shell and scripting language… built on the .NET Framework.”  What is so great about PowerShell?  Why should you use it?
• PowerShell is both a command-line shell and scripting language
• PowerShell can interact with a dizzying number of technologies.
• .NET Framework, the Registry, COM, WMI, ADSI.  Exchange, Sharepoint, Systems Center, Hyper-V, SQL.  VMware vCenter, Cisco UCS, Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop.  REST APIs, XML, CSV, JSON, websites, Excel and other Office applications.  C# and other languages, DLLs and other binaries, including *nix tools.
• PowerShell is object-based.This gives us incredible flexibility.  Filter, sort, measure, group, compare or take other actions on objects as they pass through the pipeline.  Work with properties and methods rather than raw text.
• Microsoft is putting its full weight behind PowerShell.PowerShell isn’t going away.  It is a requirement in the Microsoft Common Engineering Criteria, and a Server product cannot be shipped without a PowerShell interface.
• In many cases, Microsoft is building their GUI with the help of Powershell only. Here we can perform more than what we think on GUI.
• PowerShell also provides a hosting API with which the PowerShell runtime can be embedded inside other applications.

BackGround   

• Every released version of Microsoft DOS and Microsoft Windows for personal computers has Shell, so till Windows9x, it was relying on Command.com and later on in NT family it came as cmd.exe
• In 1998, MS launched Cscript.exe to allow compatible scripting languages like Jscript and VBScript.
•  By 2002 Microsoft had started to develop a new approach to command line management, including a shell called Monad (also known as Microsoft Shell or MSH) 
• PowerShell version 1 was released on September 26, 2006 , but officially released on Nov 14, 2006.       
•   PowerShell v2.0 was completed and released to manufacturing in August 2009, as an integral part of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
• On 18 August 2016, Microsoft announced that they had made PowerShell open-source and cross-platform with support for Windows, OS X, CentOS and Ubuntu.
• The move to open source created a second incarnation of PowerShell called "PowerShell Core", which runs on .NET Core. It is distinct from "Windows PowerShell", which runs on the full .NET Framework. Starting with version 5.1, PowerShell Core is bundled with Windows Server 2016 Nano Server.

READ MORE...