Creating a C# extension

For most day-to-day operations, the commands provided by PowerShell from Windows features, or third-party modules, give you all the functionality you need. In some cases, as you saw in the Leveraging .NET methods recipe, commands do not exist to achieve your goal. In those cases, you can make use of the methods provided by .NET.

There are also cases where you need to perform more complex operations without PowerShell cmdlet or direct .NET support. You may, for example, have a component of an ASP.NET web application, written in C# but which you now wish to repurpose for administrative scripting purposes.

PowerShell makes it easy to add a class, based on .NET language source code, into a PowerShell session. You supply the C# code, and PowerShell creates a .NET class that you can use in the same way you use .NET methods (and using virtually the same syntax). To do this, you use the Add-Type cmdlet and specify the C# code for your class/type(s). PowerShell...