Learn PowerShell Core 6.0

Automate and control administrative tasks using DevOps principles

David das Neves, Jan-Hendrik Peters

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788835473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Networking
• Index: Computer Science

Enhance your skills in expert module development, deployment, security, DevOps, and cloud

Key Features

• A step-by-step guide to get you started with PowerShell Core 6.0
• Harness the capabilities of PowerShell Core 6.0 to perform simple to complex administration tasks
• Learn core administrative concepts such as scripting, pipelines, and DSC

Book Description

Beginning with an overview of the different versions of PowerShell, Learn PowerShell Core 6.0 introduces you to VSCode and then dives into helping you understand the basic techniques in PowerShell scripting. You will cover advanced coding techniques, learn how to write reusable code as well as store and load data with PowerShell.

This book will help you understand PowerShell security and Just Enough Administration, enabling you to create your own PowerShell repository. The last set of chapters will guide you in setting up, configuring, and working with Release Pipelines in VSCode and VSTS, and help you understand PowerShell DSC. In addition to this, you will learn how to use PowerShell with Windows, Azure, Microsoft Online Services, SCCM, and SQL Server. The final chapter will provide you with some use cases and pro tips.

By the end of this book, you will be able to create professional reusable code using security insight and knowledge of working with PowerShell Core 6.0 and its most important capabilities.

What you will learn

• Get to grips with Powershell Core 6.0
• Explore basic and advanced PowerShell scripting techniques
• Get to grips with Windows PowerShell Security
• Work with centralization and DevOps with PowerShell
• Implement PowerShell in your organization through real-life examples
• Learn to create GUIs and use DSC in production

Who this book is for

If you are a Windows administrator or a DevOps user who wants to leverage PowerShell to automate simple to complex tasks, then this book is for you. Whether you know nothing about PowerShell or just enough to get by, this guide will give you what you need to go to take your scripting to the next level. You'll also find this book useful if you're a PowerShell expert looking to expand your knowledge in areas such as PowerShell Security and DevOps.

Basic Coding Techniques

In this chapter, you'll learn about the basics in PowerShell scripting, which are necessary to develop and understand most PowerShell scripts. We recommend using VSCode when working with the examples provided in this and all subsequent chapters. We put forth our argument in its favor in the previous chapter and the examples assume they are run in the editor's console. You can download the code from GitHub to work with the provided examples; you can find them at https://github.com/ddneves/Book_Learn_PowerShell.

Keep in mind that you should put a lot of efforts into training yourself with the content of this chapter, because it is the foundation for upcoming chapters. Some of the topics are simply introduced and will be expanded upon in upcoming chapters, providing the best didactic methods.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Comments
• Regions
• Types
• Pipelines
• Commands and parameters
• PSDrives and PSProviders
• PowerShell's scripting language:
  
  • Operators
  • Loops
  • Break and Continue
  • If...ElseIf...Else
  • Switch

Comments

I'd like to introduce comments right at the beginning. As you may know (from other scripting or coding languages), comments are necessary to describe and explain your code. Developers often argue that code is self-explanatory, but that is a lie. You will quickly learn that, even when working with your own scripts, it is always good to have some comments on the side. You can use either line comments or comment blocks in PowerShell, which make use of the key character (#), and look as follows:

# this is a comment line
## this as well

<#
this is a comment block
#>

<# this as well
 this as well
this as well
#>

As we are starting with the basics, you should know that there are some best practices for writing code. We will provide many of them throughout this book, but the most important one is to always provide comments with your code, to help the reader, other coders, or even yourself, if you need to reuse or debug your code. If you need to write multiline comments, you can use comment blocks. For most of the other scenarios, line comments fulfill the job. Later on, you will see other commenting techniques, and how they can be valuable.

Regions

Regions are used to structure your code and give parts of the code separated names. Regions are special comments in your scripts that can be used to give structure to your code:

Regions are always initiated with the #region keyword followed by the title. You can also use a multi-word title, and nest as many regions as you want. In Visual Studio Code, you will also be able to collapse complete regions, to get a better overview. Just move the mouse cursor onto the left side of the opened region, and it will show you all possible collapse options, as visible in the previous screenshot. You can also fold all of the ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Dedication
• Packt Upsell
• Contributors
• Preface
• Current PowerShell Versions
• PowerShell ISE Versus VSCode
• Basic Coding Techniques
• Advanced Coding Techniques
• Writing Reusable Code
• Working with Data
• Understanding PowerShell Security
• Just Enough Administration
• DevOps with PowerShell
• Creating Your Own PowerShell Repository
• VSCode and PowerShell Release Pipelines
• PowerShell Desired State Configuration
• Working with Windows
• Working with Azure
• Connecting to Microsoft Online Services
• Working with SCCM and SQL Server
• PowerShell Deep Dives
• PowerShell ISE Hotkeys
• Assessments
• Other Books You May Enjoy