The PowerShell language was developed to provide engineers with a method to quickly automate the provisioning and management of environments. In the last decade, PowerShell's use has greatly expanded, to encompass the setup and configuration of a myriad of hardware and software systems. Since third-party manufacturers are creating PowerShell modules to control their systems, PowerShell is becoming the automation language of choice. It is being used to configure multiple systems from multiple manufacturers, with a single set of PowerShell code.

Creating scripts for enterprise environments requires a robust scripting framework. A scripting framework consists of reusable code that you can leverage for a large majority of your scripts. This framework needs to be efficient, reliable, and secure. It must also provide logging capabilities, leverage answer files, and be flexible for execution on a wide variety of systems.

As you are exploring this book, you will learn a large number of tested and industry-proven scripting techniques. The examples you create will be applied at the end of the book in a Windows server scanning script. This will enable you to quickly integrate new sections of code into your own scripts, and will provide a trusted platform you can confidently deploy in your environment.

In this chapter, you will: