PowerShell Cookbook, 4th Edition

Chapter 17. Extend the Reach of PowerShell

17.0 Introduction

The PowerShell environment is phenomenally comprehensive. It provides a great surface of cmdlets to help you manage your system, a great scripting language to let you automate those tasks, and direct access to all the utilities and tools you already know.

The cmdlets, scripting language, and preexisting tools are just part of what makes PowerShell so comprehensive, however. In addition to these features, PowerShell provides access to a handful of technologies that drastically increase its capabilities: the .NET Framework, WMI, COM automation objects, native Windows API calls, and more.

Not only does PowerShell give you access to these technologies, but it also gives you access to them in a consistent way. The techniques you use to interact with properties and methods of PowerShell objects are the same techniques that you use to interact with properties and methods of .NET objects. In turn, those are the same techniques that you use to work with WMI and COM objects.

Working with these techniques and technologies provides another huge benefit—knowledge that easily transfers to working in .NET programming languages such as C#.

17.1 Automate Programs Using COM Scripting Interfaces

Problem

You want to automate a program or system task through its COM automation interface.

Solution

To instantiate and work with COM objects, use the New-Object cmdlet’s -ComObject parameter.

$shell = New-Object -ComObject "Shell.Application" ...