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So to get started, let's talk about the PSCredential object,

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which is utilized for storing credentials.

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The PSCredential object represents a set of security credentials,

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so a username and a password.

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Now, to populate the PSCredential object,

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we obviously need to provide credentials and then the

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Credential object is populated.

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Once we have that object, it can be passed as a parameter into other commands.

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For example, if we wish to connect to a machine,

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we can pass the Credential object as part of that.

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Now, to create PSCredential objects,

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we can create it using what's referred to as the Get‑Credential cmdlet.

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Now, you may have seen this before.

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This is where we type Get‑Credential, and it prompts a Windows prompt,

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like a regular username,

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password Windows prompt that we can enter credentials into,

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and then that becomes the basis of the PSCredential object.

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The second option is to create a SecureString object.

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Now,

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what this means is we're basically passing in a kind of

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free text string value for the username,

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but for the password, we basically type a string text value,

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but convert that to a SecureString,

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so a different approach to the Get‑Credential.

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The last one is to actually just create a PSCredential object, which we can do.

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We can say New, PSCredential Object,

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and then pass in the various pieces that we need to construct the set of

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credentials that we wish to utilize going forward.

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Now, if we do this within PowerShell and using that Get‑Credential,

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if I wish to create some Globomantics kind of user credentials,

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I could create a variable called creds, or credentials,

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or whatever you wish to call it, and then just type Get‑Credential.

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Now, the difference here, when we just use Get‑Credential with no parameters,

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it will launch the Windows box with two empty boxes,

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so we'll get the username, and the password will be empty.

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Now,

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when we pass a Credential property, which will be DOMAIN\user, for example,

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then that username field is automatically populated for us.

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This is actually quite a common approach that used,

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for example, when you connect to Microsoft 365 or

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Azure Active Directory in the cloud.

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Now, we can create the PSCredential object from the two sets of values.

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So we could create a user property.

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So you can see, I've got a variable here called user, and it's DOMAIN\user,

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and then my password will be ConvertTo‑SecureString, which is the cmdlet

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that will change my password to a SecureString value, my password is just

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password in blue there, and then of course, as plain text, then I'm going

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to save that. To create the PSCredential object, we then create a new

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object, and the new object is a System.Management.Automation, and there we

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have it, PSCredential, and we pass in the $user and the $pwd as the option.

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We can also do it a little bit differently by using properties instead,

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so we could define the object with a specific type,

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which will still be System.Management.Automation.PSCredential, and

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then the argument list or the properties that we wish to send to it would be the $user and the $pwd.