Congratulations! This is 20th and last lesson in the course – and my aim here is to show you various paths you can take your PowerShell journey to. I’m going to show what else you can do within PowerShell itself, as well how to keep up-to-day plus – what other doors writing code has opened for you – I’d love to hear back about this! I hope you’ve enjoyed the course so far and it will be helped you in some way – either solve a problem, got promotion, or simply learnt something new.

PowerShell is a great server automation tool, but what about Internet and any other web served services? As it turns out, PowerShell is great in scrapping websites and consuming APIs – and it’s been one of the main development areas of the tool in the last couple of years. In this lesson we are going to see how to use PowerShell to download files, scrap websites, discover links.

Although PowerShell treats everything as object – including text strings – working with text might be particularly difficult – at least when first approached. In this lesson we are going to have a closer look at what is possible with built in text methods and see how these can help us e.g. by extracting a substring of text. PowerShell can also be great at parsing log files – we will use Select-String to quickly filter out the lines of text with the phrase we are looking for e.

In the last part of scripting series, we will make the script to be able to query remote machines, e.g. servers. We will also check how to add parameters to the script (and configure the default value of parameter) so that user will able to pass the parameter name like in a standard PowerShell cmdlet. Finally, we are going to format the script so that it looks more reliable and make some refactoring so that the logic is simpler.

In this lesson we are taking our script further by adding details about IP configuration and last installed hotfixes. But it turns out, the networking information is not that shallow as it seems at the first glance – thus I’ll show you how to retrieve the information from the configuration. We will also look on how to reuse our already created object so that we don’t need to duplicate code.

In this lesson we carry on writing the scripting by gathering requirements and putting them together as comments in code. Then we will retrieve OS information with the help of WMI and display it on the screen with Write-Host. Although using Write-Host is easy to use, it doesn’t really allow us to do very much e.g. we cannot export information to the CSV, therefore we change it and start using custom PSObject – that way our script will start returning information like a regular PowerShell command.