Using .NET

It's necessary to use .NET code to access certain functionality, but most of what you'll be doing is using tire PowerShell language. .NET enters tire picture because you need to load extra bits and create new objects.
The .NET Framework or just .NET (there are differences but we don't need to worry about drem) is tire way to create applications in the modern Microsoft environment. Microsoft made .NET available in 2002, and new versions have appeared on a regular basis since then. Each new version of .NET tends to be a superset of tire previous version, in that new functionality is added but tire old functionality remains more
or less intact.

.NET VERSIONS PowerShell vl needs .NET 2.0. PowerShell v2 needs .NET 2.0 apart from some features that require .NET 3.5 SP1. Unless you need multiple versions of .NET loaded, j u s t load .NET 3.5 SP 1, as it also contains .NET 2.0. PowerShell is based on .NET, and as we've seen, one of tire major features is that
PowerShell cmdlets output .NET objects rather than text we're used to in more traditional shells. These .NET objects are passed along tire pipeline so they can be used by other cmdlets.
As with any piece of technology, there's a set of terminology we need to master. So we'll start by looking at the terms used when talking about .NET and explain them from an administrator's viewpoint.  This is definitely .NET for administrators rather than a full explanation of .NET.

It's possible to access some .NET functionality, such as tire Math functions, directly from PowerShell,  not everything is immediately available. We'll learn how to load additional .NET functionality, such as SMO or tire IIS interface, into PowerShell and how to work with it. Our old friend Get-Member will be useful when we start to investigate working with .NET. First, we need to know what we're talking about, so we'll look at .NET terminology.