Book Image

Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting (Second Edition) - Second Edition

By : Brenton J.W. Blawat
Book Image

Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting (Second Edition) - Second Edition

By: Brenton J.W. Blawat

Overview of this book

PowerShell scripts offer a handy way to automate various chores. Working with these scripts effectively can be a difficult task. This comprehensive guide starts from scratch and covers advanced-level topics to make you a PowerShell expert. The first module, PowerShell Fundamentals, begins with new features, installing PowerShell on Linux, working with parameters and objects, and also how you can work with .NET classes from within PowerShell. In the next module, you’ll see how to efficiently manage large amounts of data and interact with other services using PowerShell. You’ll be able to make the most of PowerShell’s powerful automation feature, where you will have different methods to parse and manipulate data, regular expressions, and WMI. After automation, you will enter the Extending PowerShell module, which covers topics such as asynchronous processing and, creating modules. The final step is to secure your PowerShell, so you will land in the last module, Securing and Debugging PowerShell, which covers PowerShell execution policies, error handling techniques, and testing. By the end of the book, you will be an expert in using the PowerShell language.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Using


The using keyword was introduced with PowerShell 5.0. The using keyword may be used in a script, a module, or in the console.

The using keyword does a number of different things. It can import and declare:

  • Assemblies
  • Modules
  • Namespaces

In the context of working with .NET, assemblies and namespaces are of interest.

Future plans for the using command look to include aliasing as well as support for type and command objects. For example, we might expect the following to work in the future:

using namespace NetInfo = System.Net.NetworkInformation

This statement will fail with a not supported error at this time.

Using assemblies

If an assembly is listed in the using statement for a script, it will be loaded. For example, the System.Windows.Forms may be loaded:

using assembly 'System.Windows.Forms, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' 

Add-Type is able to do much the same thing:

Add-Type -AssemblyName 'System.Windows.Forms, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken...