Working with credentials

One of the first things you will notice when working with PowerShell is that many cmdlets support a parameter called credential. Most of those cmdlets, whether you work on PowerShell Core or Windows PowerShell, can be executed remotely and with different credentials. In order to see which cmdlets support a Credential parameter, you can use the ParameterName parameter with Get-Command to discover them.

Parameters control the way cmdlets work, much like command-line parameters, but are highly standardized. Every parameter begins with a dash and is followed by one or more parameter values. The following code sample helps illustrate which cmdlets can use the Credential parameter, for example.

# Which cmdlets support credentials?
Get-Command -ParameterName Credential

First of all, we need to see what a credential actually is by looking at the next code block:

# A combination of account and .NET SecureString object
$username = 'contoso\admin'
$password = 'P@ssw0rd' | ConvertTo...