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

What is a snap-in?


A snap-in was the precursor to a module. It was the mechanism available to extend the set of commands in PowerShell 1.0. The Cmdlet implementation inside a snap-in is similar to a binary module (written in a language such as C#). A snap-in contains a specialized class that holds the fields where were moved into the module manifest with PowerShell 2.0.

Snap-ins must be installed or registered before they can be used. This can be done using installutil, which is part of the .NET framework package. Many vendors (including Microsoft) took to releasing Microsoft Installer (MSI) packages to simplify the snap-in installation.

Modules have, for the most part, made snap-ins obsolete. Manifest modules accompanied by a binary module offer the same performance benefits without the installation or registration overhead.

The list of snap-ins may be viewed using the following command:

Get-PSSnapIn -Registered

If the Registered parameter is excluded, Get-PSSnapIn will show the snap-ins that...