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I suppose this is as good a time as any to go back to PowerShell and let

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me demonstrate how you can create custom properties,

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custom objects,

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and why you're going to find this of value in your PowerShell work.

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Working with custom objects and properties is really probably

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my favorite part about being in PowerShell.

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It almost seems like magic to me.

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It may take a bit to get your head around some of these concepts,

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but once you understand how they work,

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you will find yourself using them all of the time.

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Let me give you an example of some ways you can create custom properties

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and custom objects and why you might want to do that.

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So let's say that I want to use the Get‑TimeZone command,

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so here's what it looks like by default,

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but, you know, I want a little more than that,

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so I'm going to rerun the command,

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and I'm going to select all of the properties because I'd like that output,

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but I now want to create an additional custom property.

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The property name is defined with my custom hash table,

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which has two predefined keys, Name and Expression.

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So the Name of my property is going to be Computername,

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and the Expression will be the code inside the script block,

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and in this case, I'm just returning the computername environmental variable.

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When I run this,

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I now get a custom object really that has all of

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the properties from Get‑TimeZone, plus the custom property,

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Computername, that I created.

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Here's an example that does a little bit more than that.

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So let's do Get‑Process,

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and I'm going to filter where all the processes have a

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working set size greater or equal to 50 MB,

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and now I'll start selecting the object properties that I want to keep,

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such as Id and Name, and now I'm going to create a custom property.

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So I'm going to create a custom property,

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and you should start working at trying to decipher

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the code that's on the screen here.

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So the property name will be called MemoryMB,

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the value is the code inside the script blocks,

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and I'm taking the current object in the pipeline,

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that's a $_, that object's working set property using the alias property,

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ws, so I've got $_.ws / 1 MB, that's in parentheses,

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so PowerShell will treat that as 1 unit,

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and then I'm going to treat that as an int32.

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This will have the effect of rounding it to an integer

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and eliminating any decimal points.

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I'm now going to create another property called Threads that will give me the

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count of the number of threads associated with each process,

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and now I'm going to create a property called Runtime,

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and the value of Runtime will be the current datetime

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minus when the process started.

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So again, the Starttime is a property of a Process object,

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$_ means the current object in the pipeline,

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and I'm just referencing the property with that dotted notation.

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And then just to make it nice and easy to read,

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I'll pipe the whole results to Format‑Table,

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and there we go.

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So there are all the processes with a working set size greater than 50 MB,

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I see my ID, Name, and the custom properties that I created,

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MemoryMB.

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Because I treated it as an int32, it rounded everything to the nearest integer,

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so I get a nice, clean result.

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Here's another example about why you need to read the help,

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and we're going to do even more with creating things on the fly.

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So I'm going to take the numbers 1 through 10 and sort them,

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but I'm going to sort them on a custom property that doesn't even exist.

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And, in fact, I don't even really have a name for it.

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It's just basically going to take each number,

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and I'm using the modulo operator.

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That's the percent symbol.

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This is a math operation,

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which will tell you whether there are remaining numbers.

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So dividing a number by 2 will give me even numbers first

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and then odd numbers because there's no remainder when I

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divide by 2 on an even number.

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So now I have the numbers 1 through 10 basically

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sorted whether they're even or odd, kind of an artificial example,

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other than the fact I wanted to show you that there's really no limit

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to what you can do with these custom properties.

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And again, that $_ modulo 2 is in a script block,

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so you can use these script blocks to kind of define things on the fly.

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Let me give you another example.

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Let's run Get‑ChildItem on my scripts folder and get

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just the top‑level directories.

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I'm going to sort those top‑level directories this way.

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I'm creating a custom property, and in this custom property,

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I'm going to get all of the files in each top‑level folder recursively

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and then get the count property of all of those files,

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and I'm going to then do this sort in descending order.

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Then I will select the first 5 objects that come through the pipeline.

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So these are the top five directories that have the most files in them.

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Again, maybe not something that you need on a production level,

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but I want you to understand the process that I used so that

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when you need to do something similar, you go,

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oh, yeah, Jeff showed me how to create a custom property to sort on,

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and you understand how it works and why you might want to use it.

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We can do a similar thing with grouping.

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So I'm going to get all of my ps1 files,

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and I'm going to group the results based on the year of the

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LastWriteTime property of the current object in the pipeline.

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So every file that comes through, I'm going to group on this custom property,

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so now I can see how many items I have and the corresponding year.

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So that's creating custom properties.

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Let's look now at custom objects.

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So I'm going to create a custom object with some new properties.

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One of them will be all of the processes.

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I'm going to use Get‑CimInstance, I'll do a similar thing for services,

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and I just want to get the ones that are running.

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That'll take a moment to run.

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Now I'm going to create a hash table, so I'm creating a variable,

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$hash, to hold the results.

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So my first key is going to call the Computername.

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I'll use the environmental variable for computername,

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I will grab the Version number from the PSVersion table,

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here's another example of the dotted notation,

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my ProcessCount, I'll do a similar thing with the Services,

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and now I'm going to run the Get‑Uptime command,

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which is in PowerShell 7, and close the hash table.

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So the hash table looks like the hash table that we have seen before.

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Now the fun part.

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I want to turn this into an actual object.

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I can use New‑Object and use the PSObject as the type name,

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which is kind of the base, if you will, and then say use the hash table,

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$hash, for all of the properties,

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and I'm just going to tee this to a variable $new so I can

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do something else with it in a moment.

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There you go.

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So you can see the properties and the names are the same as in the hash table,

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but this is structured as an object.

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In fact, my pipe $new,

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which I saved because I tee‑ed it to Get‑Member, you can see that this

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is a System.Management.Automation.PSCustomObject.

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There are some advanced ways that you can insert type names,

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but for now, we're going to leave it as a generic custom object.

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Because it's a custom object, I can write to the pipeline.

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So if I wanted to, I could send this to Out‑File,

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or Out‑Printer, or Export‑CSV just about anything that I would want to do.

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The other way that you could do this,

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and the way that I tend to do it when I get into scripting,

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would be an approach like this.

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So I'm going to create a variable, $obj,

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and I'm going to still create a hash table,

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but in front of the hash table, I'm putting this pscustomobject type accelerator.

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So I'm going to put in my same properties and values that I had before,

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still creating the hash table,

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except PowerShell knows to create this as a custom object,

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and you'll see this here in just a second.

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I'm going to go ahead and add the TimeZone to this object, and we'll do Uptime.

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So now, what do I have for $obj?

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So there's my custom object.

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When I created the hash table with New‑Object,

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the property names are not in any particular order.

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When you use a custom object, as I've done here,

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the property names will be displayed in the order that

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you entered them into the hash table.

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That may make a difference to you as to what you're doing.

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There are additional scripting techniques that you can use to format objects.

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That's beyond the scope of what we can do here.

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But if you need to have some control over the order of the property names,

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create a custom object.

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And this also is much nicer because I don't have to create the hash table and

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then take the second step of creating the custom object.

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Let me wrap up by revisiting an example that we just did a moment ago.

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I'm going to create a custom object, as it did earlier with Select object,

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but this time,

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I'm going to create a PSCustomObject using the type

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accelerator I just showed you.

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So let me get all the processes that are greater than

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50 MB for the working set value, use the foreach keyword,

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which is another way of looping through a collection of objects.

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So for each $p, which would be the current object in the array of $procs,

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I am going to create a custom object using the hash table and the

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pscustomobject type accelerator we just looked at.

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Now I can use the same Select object,

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and the hash table values that I used at the beginning of the demo,

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I can use them here.

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So I'll get the Id, I'll get the name, I'll create my MemoryMB property name,

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and I'm using for the value the same code that was in the

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Expression block in the Select object.

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We can do Threads, we'll get that thread.count again, and the Runtime.

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Now, the one difference that I have made,

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by the way, versus the previous example with Select object,

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Select object was doing this all in line,

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so it's using $_, in this case, I'm using the foreach keyword,

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so this enumerator allows me to create my own variable, and

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that's why I'm using $p, so it's not $_. It's $p.

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Now, let's continue on here and get the Computername.

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Now, since I hit Enter, PowerShell will process these things and create

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a custom object for every item that's in $procs, and there it is. This

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is a, to my way of thinking, sometimes an easier way if I'm creating a

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custom object, and this is something I use often in my scripting, this

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is a much easier way to create an object I think is easier to read than

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using Select objects. If you were doing something at the console,

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kind of a one‑off,

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I need to quickly bang this out, Select object with those hash tables

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worked perfectly fine. For more long‑term maintainability,

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especially, as I said, when you get the scripting, you

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might find this approach much easier.

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Always be thinking about objects and working with objects in the

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pipeline, Whether you're working with objects in dotted notation or

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creating custom properties or custom objects,

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this is really important stuff.

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Look for ways to take advantage of these things.

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I hope you now feel a little more comfortable about knowing what an object is,

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how to discover it.

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Get‑Member is your friend. Grab the downloads,

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give all this to try, and see for yourself.

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Thanks for watching this lesson.

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So come back for one more fun‑filled module where we learn more about taking advantage and learning about the PowerShell 7 language.