In the previous chapter, we talked about writing modular, reusable code. We saw the benefits of adding your code to a source code versioning solution such as Git. You have seen how to sign your code after applying best practices to it.
Working with data is a necessity to create good scripts and to interact with other services. This chapter will start with the most used types of data—registry and files—and show how to create configurations stored in XML files. These configuration settings can easily be retrieved and set. Furthermore, additional data files such as CSV, but also JSON, are explained. Later, we will also take a dedicated look at PowerShell classes, as they have been added to PowerShell version 5. This chapter teaches the most important tasks: how to store data and how to load data with PowerShell.
These are the topics we'll be covering in this chapter:
- Registry
- Files
- CSV
- XML
- CLIXML
- JSON
- Classes