Part 4. Advanced PowerShell

One of PowerShell’s greatest strengths is its ability to connect to other technologies, such as WMI, CIM, COM, .NET, and a host of other acronyms. In part 4, we’ll briefly look at each of these and demonstrate how PowerShell can use them. We’ll provide one caution: We don’t dive as deeply into these as we have the other topics in this book. That’s because they are external technologies. Although accessed from within PowerShell, they can also be used from a variety of other places, and each could quite easily consume an entire book (and in some cases, others have already written those books—which we’ll mention as appropriate within the chapters). Our focus in these chapters will be to look at how PowerShell can use these technologies, give you a starting place for doing so, and then give you direction for further independent exploration.

Having said that, these additional technologies provide a mass of functionality that’ll be of great benefit to you in automating tasks in your environment. We encourage you to learn these additional techniques.