ABCD of PowerShell & Automating SharePoint 2016 Installation

​Some of us have already worked with PowerShell and love it, while others seem to be confused and wonder how can one remember so many commands to get things done. Maybe its time we break it down for the guys who find it difficult to work with and show them how powerful it is when dealing with every day tasks related to SharePoint - for both Admins and Developers.

What is PowerShell

Its a scripting language and very similar to batch jobs which are simply plain-text files that execute through a console application to achieve automation tasks on a machine.

I have heard a few people referring to it as a tool or framework and i disagree with this approach. Lets just keep PowerShell a simple plain human-readable language.

What does it Contain, where do we write it and how do we run it

It contains logic loops, variable, methods and other entities from the programming world. 

The scripts can be written using any text editor and i usually write my PowerShell scripts using Notepad++ and then save it as a plain-text file having a .ps1 extension. To run the scripts you can initiate PowerShell console session and its basically the command-line console with blue as background color and text in white.  You can always change the background color  to suit your needs.

The following line will  print a line of red text on a yellow background:

Write-Host "See how cool this is?" -Backgroundcolor
orange -Foregroundcolor black

The console keeps the various variable declarations in memory for the entire duration of the PowerShell session. The image below shows you a fairly simple PowerShell session in which variables have been declared and are remembered throughout the execution of the various commands. It starts by declaring two variables, variableA and variableB, whose values will later be reused to perform mathematical operations. The script continues by changing the value of one of the two variables already declared and rerunning the same addition operation to get a different result based on the new value entered.

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