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Hi, everyone, and welcome back.

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Thanks for sticking with me.

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In this lesson, we are going to look at working with objects in PowerShell.

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When I teach PowerShell,

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I'm always faced with kind of a chicken and egg situation.

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I want to teach you something but sometimes I have to use something that I

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haven't taught you yet in order to teach you something,

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so which do I do first?

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Well, I've been talking about objects,

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and we've been using them throughout this course,

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but I haven't really explained them.

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So in this module,

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I want to spend a little more time and dive deeper into objects in PowerShell.

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So what is an object?

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Well,

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an object from our point of view, as IT pros, is just a representation in

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software of something that you want to manage or work with.

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That thing could be a file, could be a service,

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it could be a vegetable, it could be a mailbox,

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a SharePoint site.

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It doesn't matter.

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It's just something that has been defined through some

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software mechanism or construction that represents the

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thing that you want to work with.

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An object should be considered a black box,

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meaning we really don't care how it's constructed.

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I don't care.

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I don't need to know what language it's written in or how it's written,

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or who wrote it, or anything like that.

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All I care about is how do I work with it?

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How do I decide what objects I'm going to work with?

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What are those, what do they look like?

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How do I take advantage of them?

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Those are the things that matter to me because in PowerShell,

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everything that I work with is some type of object.

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This is the biggest thing about learning PowerShell.

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We move from a text‑based paradigm,

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which is kind of what we had with batch files,

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and to a certain degree VBScript, and lots of other languages.

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There's nothing necessarily wrong with that approach,

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but that approach is different than PowerShell PowerShell

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is working with objects in the pipeline.

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Once you get your head around that idea,

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you can do a lot more with PowerShell,

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and you'll wonder why you waited so long to learn it,

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so let's dive into objects a bit deeper.

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Objects can be described by their members.

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There are three types of members we primarily deal with in PowerShell,

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well, actually, only two.

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There is a property.

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A property is just something that describes the object,

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color, size, status, working set size.

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Those are all properties.

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Sometimes you can change the property, and sometimes the property is read‑only.

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Many of the cmdlets that you work with in PowerShell take advantage and

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leverage the property names of a particular object.

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Methods are things that we can do to the object or have the object do.

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We can stop a process, we can start a service, we can create a file.

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Those are all methods.

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Now,

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we don't have to be .NET developers to use PowerShell because there are

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cmdlets that often take advantage and use these methods for us.

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The other member type that you'll see is an event.

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Windows is an event‑driven operating system.

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Things are closing, and opening, and starting, and exiting.

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When an event happens, it is set to fire,

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and then Windows is designed to react to those

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different events when you click a button,

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for example.

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Although when it comes to working with objects,

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we really won't be working with events.

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Now, as I said, everything in PowerShell is an object.

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For the most part, you know some of these object types already.

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These are just a few of the ones that you'll probably

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reference all the time or use all the time.

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Things like strings, which is just text,

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Int32, there's also Int64, which are different size numbers.

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You don't have to be a dominant developer.

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You'll actually learn a little .NET or a little C#

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the more you work with PowerShell.

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There's a DateTime object, Boolean values,

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which are true/false, or even something like XML.

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PowerShell is savvy enough to know, if you type something of pipeline,

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it will know what that is.

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Or as I'll show you, you can tell PowerShell,

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hey, make this a DateTime object or make this a number.

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In fact, we have a couple operators that I refer to as the type operators,

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‑Is dash and ‑As.

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‑Is is a testing parameter, say, hey,

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is this thing this particular type or take this thing

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and treat it as that particular type.

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Now, sometimes,

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the As operator doesn't always work because I can't necessarily

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coerce a DateTime to become an XML document,

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but I could take a string and say, hey,

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take this string and treat it as a DateTime object.

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I'll get to that, and you'll see that in the demonstration.

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Now, throughout this course,

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I've been working with objects and referencing an object notation,

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so let me go into this a little bit further here.

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We can reference objects and the members of those objects via a dotted notation.

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So if I create a variable, $s, make it a string,

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foo, I can reference properties of that object using this dotted notation.

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So I can say, hey, I know that the string has a length of property,

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and I can reference that by taking my object,

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which is held by $s.

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and then the name of the member, in this case,

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the length property, and PowerShell will then display the value of that property.

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So it's really quite simple and easy to do.

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If you pipe $s to Get‑Member,

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Get‑Member will display all of the information it knows about that object,

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so you can discover properties, and methods, and events.

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One thing to keep in mind when you work with PowerShell, PowerShell does a lot

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to abstract the sausage making and everything that goes on behind the hood, and

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there are a number of things that PowerShell adds to say the native .NET

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Framework to make it easier for IT pros to work with PowerShell. Microsoft did

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not want you to be a .NET developer.

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A lot of the initial push for PowerShell were for IT pros to say, hey, here's a

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tool to help you put out that fire and to get your job done.

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The cmdlets are a good start, and they work with objects,

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but don't assume that everything that you see when you run a command

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like Get‑Service is all there is about that object.

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Get‑Member will show you everything that you need to know,

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and once you discover those things, then you can use that information to do even more.