Course: Powershell Development

In this course you will learn what PowerShell 3.0 is all about, in a way that will help you get up and started easily and painlessly. You’ll start out by learning what the pieces are of PowerShell 3.0 and how to use the interactive scripting editor. Then you’ll learn about commandlets which are the heart of PowerShell before moving on to understanding execution policies and paths, two things that often trip up new PowerShell users. Once you are acclimated you learn about Monad, the original vision for PowerShell. So how you can understand how the PowerShell of today represents a vision from ten years ago. Then finally you’ll use that knowledge to understand the object pipeline so that you can start writing scripts that work well with PowerShell instead of coding as if you are writing C# or VB .Net code.

In this course you’ll learn to customize and extend PowerShell for your own needs. To start with you’ll learn about profiles which let you control the features that are available whenever you open up a PowerShell console, PowerShell Ice, or any other host for that matter. Then you’ll learn how to create custom commandlets with .NET before switching over to learn how to build script commandlets and modules using PowerShell scripting.

One of the main goals of PowerShell is to make it easy for system administrators and not developers to write scripts to make them more productive. To that end PowerShell has a number of features that are designed to make things easy to understand for system administrators. In this course we’ll take a look at some of that functionality how PowerShell provides an item called providers which will let you treat things like the certificate store and the registry as if it was a drive using paths and treat items just like you would treat files. Then we are going to move on to the bread and butter of PowerShell which is administration. So we’ll look at how you can sign your scripts to make them safe in your environment, then we’ll look at how you can setup remote scripting and use jobs in order to administer thousands of machines from the comfort of your own desktop.

In this course you’ll learn all about PowerShell Scripting. We’ll start off by looking at how PowerShell treats variables and how you can use basic variables like strings, arrays, and hash tables. Once you understand this we’ll move on to functions, so you can codify your functionality into easily reused pieces. Next we’ll look how functions can work with the object pipeline and how you can control the scope of your variables and your functions to prevent your scripts from colliding with each other. Once you understand all of that we’ll take a look at types and objects before we close off with a look at collecting input, effective error handling, and good comment practices.