Creating a cmdlet
As noted previously in this chapter, for most operations, the commands and cmdlets available to you natively provide all the functionality you need. In the Creating a C# Extension recipe, you saw how you could create a class definition and add it to PowerShell. In some cases, you may wish to expand on the class definition and create a custom cmdlet.
Creating a compiled cmdlet requires you to either use a tool such as Visual Studio or use the free tools provided by Microsoft as part of the .NET Core Software Development Kit (SDK). The free tools in the SDK are more than adequate to help you to create a cmdlet using C#. Microsoft’s Visual Studio, whether the free community edition or the commercial releases, is a rich and complex tool whose inner workings are well outside the scope of this book.
As in the Creating a C# Extension recipe, an important question you should be asking is when/why should you create a cmdlet? Aside from the perennial “...