From the course: PowerShell 7 Essential Training

Why use PowerShell? - PowerShell Tutorial

From the course: PowerShell 7 Essential Training

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Why use PowerShell?

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- [Instructor] So why use PowerShell? Well, firstly, PowerShell is accessible, which means the barrier of entry to learning PowerShell is relatively low because of its near-ubiquity. If your computer is running Windows 10, then you can simply type PowerShell in the search box to get instant access to the Windows PowerShell app. PowerShell also provides the ability of creating simple and complex automation. Windows PowerShell, itself, includes more than 100 basic core commandlets, and you can, of course, write your own commandlets and then share them with others. It also provides scalable management, so basically anything you can do with a few mouse clicks in the user interface can be done more quickly and maybe more efficiently using PowerShell. And then lastly, it provides the ability of accessing information. Like many other CLIs, PowerShell provides access to the file system on the computer. In addition, utilizing PowerShell providers, you are able to access the often hard to access data and information. So why should you learn PowerShell? Well, the first thing to remember is that PowerShell's not going away. Most of the Microsoft products now utilize PowerShell, including the cloud platforms. Of course, you cannot do all of the administration within the user interface now, because many of the user interfaces, or GUIs, are PowerShell front ends, so now you can do so many user interface and new features or new administration tasks sometimes appear as PowerShell commandlets first. PowerShell allows you to automate multiple tasks, so you definitely need to know how to do that. And then, of course, it allows interaction between products and platforms. You can also now use PowerShell to manage, for example, the entire network. And then, of course, most of the Microsoft certification exams now contain specific PowerShell questions. So why use PowerShell 7, or why PowerShell 7 in general? Well, firstly, it's cross-platform. This is the first cross-platform version of PowerShell that Microsoft have now released. It uses PowerShell Core Version 7 and upwards instead of the Version 6 that it used to. It's also, which is critical here, built on top of the .NET Core 3 and upwards, instead of the regular server side or desktop side .NET framework. This is also the first release that's made under the open source license, which means if you wanted to, you can give back and provide feedback or provide changes to PowerShell itself. And then of course, most importantly, it now provides better backwards compatibility for utilizing PowerShell commandlets that exist only in Windows PowerShell versus PowerShell 7.

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