Book Image

Windows Server Automation with PowerShell Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : Thomas Lee
Book Image

Windows Server Automation with PowerShell Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By: Thomas Lee

Overview of this book

With a foreword from PowerShell creator Jeffrey Snover, this heavily updated edition is designed to help you learn how to use PowerShell 7.1 effectively and manage the core roles, features, and services of Windows Server in an enterprise setting. All scripts are compatible with both Window Server 2022 and 2019. This latest edition equips you with over 100 recipes you'll need in day-to-day work, covering a wide range of fundamental and more advanced use cases. We look at how to install and configure PowerShell 7.1, along with useful new features and optimizations, and how the PowerShell compatibility solution bridges the gap to older versions of PowerShell. Topics include using PowerShell to manage networking and DHCP in Windows Server, objects in Active Directory, Hyper-V, and Azure. Debugging is crucial, so the book shows you how to use some powerful tools to diagnose and resolve issues with Windows Server.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
Other Books You May Enjoy
17
Index

Importing format XML

PowerShell, ever since the very beginning, has displayed objects automatically and with nice-looking output. By default, PowerShell displays objects and properties for any object. It creates a table if the object to be displayed contains fewer than five properties, or it creates a list. PowerShell formats each property by calling the .ToString() method for each property.

You or the cmdlet developer can improve the output by using format XML. Format XML is custom-written XML that you store in a format.ps1XML file. The format XML file tells PowerShell precisely how to display a particular object type (as a table or a list), which properties to display, what headings to use (for tables), and how to display individual properties.

In Windows PowerShell, Microsoft included several format XML files that you can see in the Windows PowerShell home folder. You can view these by typing Get-ChileItem $PSHOME/*.format.ps1xml.

In PowerShell 7, the default format...