In the first two parts of this series (part 1; part 2) we covered the PowerShell CLI and the associated scripting language, and we also covered Cmdlets and discovered how they’re the fundamental building blocks of the PowerShell world. In this part we will be discussing the PowerShell ISE and what it can do for you. Introducing the .ps1 file format. In Part 2 of this series we ran 3 commands in the CLI to validate a directory path, create a non-existent directory and then pipe the output of the DIR command to a text file. We did all of this from the CLI because that’s how you manually enter commands for PowerShell to run. This is a bit clunky though. If we had to open the CLI every time we wanted to run commands in PowerShell its usefulness and indeed its real world applications would be limited at best. Much like the CMD prompt had batch scripts, PowerShell has its own scripting file format that allows us to write scripts and run them all at once or even as part of an automated procedure. Enter the .ps1 file. A .ps1 file is essentially the next step in the evolution of the .bat file. Like batch files, a .ps1 file is a plain text file that the PowerShell interpreter steps through line by line, running the individual commands sequentially and combining the output as necessary. For example, if we were to combine the three commands from the exercise in Part 2 into a .ps1 file (for the sake of this example we’ll call it ITPS_B3_Example1.ps1) we would start off with something that looks like this: Test-Path C:\Utils New-Item C:\Utils -ItemType directory dir | Out-File C:\Utils\dir.txt Running a script from windows explorer is as easy...