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So let's go back into our environment, and we'll look at how we create

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PSCredential objects to be able to utilize that for other commands.

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So we're back on our Windows 10 workstation, the one that's

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connected to our Globomantics servers.

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And one of the things that we want to do here is

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obviously create a PSCredential object.

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Now first off, I'm just going to create a variable here called $creds.

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And the simplest and easiest way of creating a PSCredential

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object is to call Get‑Credential, and I'm going to press Enter

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here, and you'll see it launches a Windows prompt that's going to

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ask me to enter credentials.

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So if I type Test and type Test again, I'll click OK.

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And sure enough, it creates it.

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Now, I don't have an account called Test with a password of Test, but

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what it did is it just creates a credential object.

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So it would just be a way to not actually validating

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the credentials that you type.

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So if you type the password incorrectly, then, of course, it's going to fail.

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So, what about if you wanted to actually create it with

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valid credentials and then utilize that?

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Well, if we just clear here, what we can actually do is

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remake our variable called $creds.

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Well, I'll tell you what we'll do first.

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We'll actually just use whoami first, which will tell me my training account.

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And sure enough, I'm using training domain and trainer.

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I want to utilize that, so we'll now say $creds, and we'll say Get‑Credential.

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And what we can do is initiate the first part of the credential here. So I can

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put in the name, so I can say "training\trainer".

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Now what will happen when I do this is it's already

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prefixed the username for me.

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So when I press Enter here, you'll see that my box for username

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is already populated with training/trainer.

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And then I can just type in my password like so, press Enter,

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and then if I check what's in the $creds object, you can see

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it's now got a training\trainer.

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You'll never see the password because the password is a secure string, so a

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very simple way of obviously utilizing the Get‑Credential. That is the most

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common way of creating a PSCredential object.

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Now another way is to do it, I have to refer to this as the more complicated

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approach, but I'm a great fan of kind of granularity of things.

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So I'm going to say $pwd. You can see I'm just creating simple

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accounts, so I've got my training\trainer and then my password,

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which isn't the correct one, by the way.

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But what I'm able to do here is I can then start to create a new object.

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Now the first thing you'll notice is that when I actually created the

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$creds object previously, so if I just say $creds here,

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you'll see actually it created what was called a System.Security.SecureString,

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which clearly my password variable is not.

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So, what we need to do is actually repopulate this

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variable with a different approach.

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So I'm going to say ConvertTo‑SecureString because that's what we want to do.

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We want to take the piece of plain text that we've written

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and convert it to a secure string value.

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So I'm going to say "Pass@word1", and then I'm going to say

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‑AsPlainText, and then I'll just ‑Force that to create it.

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Okay,

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so what does that look like in my password object? Well, now it

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just looks like System.Security.SecureString,

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which is exactly what we need as part of the PSCredential object.

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So what we can do now, let me just clear this down so we've got a clear screen,

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I'm going to create my $creds variable.

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And the first way of doing this is to actually say New‑Object.

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And then just like you would in any kind of coding language,

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you can kind of traverse through the namespaces.

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So, you'll see I'm going to say, System.Management.Automation,

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and then I'm going to say if I tab through,

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you'll see PS with a C. Now there's loads of them, so if I just say

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PSCre, PSCredential. And then what the PSCredential object requires

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is two objects to be present here.

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The first one, as you've guessed it, would be the user,

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the second one would be the password.

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So if I press Enter now, and when I go to my $creds object,

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you'll see that I've now got that same credential object.

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So instead of me saying Get‑Credential and having

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someone type the credentials at runtime,

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I could've stored these within text objects inside a PowerShell script.

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Now the other option I've got is to kind of, if we go back

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to this same kind of syntax that's here,

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what we can do is change it a little bit.

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Now, of course, with PowerShell, we have the ability to utilize

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various properties, so, for example ‑TypeName. This would, I

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suppose, be the strongly‑typed version of this.

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So if we go back, you can say my ‑TypeName is of PSCredential. And then

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what I can do is pass an ‑ArgumentList, and the ‑ArgumentList is going

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to be the variables that we populated.

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So I'm going to press Enter here, and then sure

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enough, you'll see my $creds object.

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So, three different ways of actually creating the PSCredential object.

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The first one being using Get‑Credential, and then the second one

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being, obviously, creating the user and the password, and then

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creating a new object and passing in the type or actually declaring

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the ‑TypeName and the ‑ArgumentList.

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All of these will work, and this will allow you to reuse that $creds

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object whenever you need to connect to anything.

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So if I need to connect to a different computer, so I can say

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Get‑ComputerInfo, for example, and if I tab through the properties,

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you'll see there's all the standard ones that are there,

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you know, kind of I want to output the values,

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I want a pipeline property,

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whatever, on certain properties, you'll find that

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you're able to pass a credential object.

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Now this is more kind of useful when you're connecting to the cloud,

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for example. You'll be able to say Get‑Credential, and it will pass

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that object to whatever the command is in, for example, Azure or Office 365.