Book Image

Mastering PowerCLI

By : Sajal Debnath
Book Image

Mastering PowerCLI

By: Sajal Debnath

Overview of this book

Have you ever wished that every morning you could automatically get a report with all the relevant information about your datacenter in exactly the same format you want? Or whether you could automate that boring, exhausting task? What if some crucial task needs to be performed on a regular basis without any error? PowerCLI scripts do all that and much more for VMware environments. It is built on top of the popular Windows PowerShell, with which you can automate server tasks and reduce manual input, allowing you to focus on more important tasks. This book will help you to achieve your goals by starting with a short refresher on PowerShell and PowerCLI and then covering the nuances of advanced functions and reusable scripts. Next you will learn how to build a vSphere-powered virtualized datacenter using PowerCLI while managing different aspects of the environment including automated installation, network, and storage. You will then manage different logical constructs of vSphere environment and different aspects of a virtual machine. Later, you will implement the best practices for a security implementation in vSphere Environment through PowerCLI before discovering how to manage other VMware environments such as SRM, vCloud Director and vCloud Air through PowerCLI. You will also learn to manage vSphere environments using advanced properties by accessing vSphere API and REST APIs through PowerCLI. Finally, you will build a Windows GUI application using PowerShell followed by a couple of sample scripts for reporting and managing vSphere environments with detailed explanations of the scripts. By the end of the book, you will have the required in-depth knowledge to master the art of PowerCLI scripting.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Mastering PowerCLI
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Building GUI using WPF


In this section, we are going to discuss how to build a windows GUI using WPF and PowerShell. WPF is more modern and provides a lot more flexibility and advanced options than WinForm. Like WinForm, building a GUI in WPF is also an event-driven approach. We define the Form and then add the controls in the form, after we define the events for the Controls so that we can control the behavior of the Form. The difference is in the way UI elements are designed in WPF. Here, we use XAML-based definitions for the UI elements.

There are two ways in which we can build a WPF-based application, either we hand code the XAML definitions or use third-party tools. The most easily available one is Visual Studio 2015, and it provides a great interface. For our use, I will use Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition (it is a free tool). In Visual Studio, we have two options: the first one is to use the Visual Studio interface and the second option is to use Blend for Visual Studio. Using...