Professional Windows® PowerShell

3.7. Coping with a Diverse World

One of the difficulties facing any administrator is that the software world is immensely varied and is constantly changing.

In this book, as is true with most computer books, all the code is tested on one or more systems. In the real world, not every machine is set up identically. So in a book on, say, Windows Server 2003, I might tell you what behavior to expect but that statement is good only at the time it is written and for the setup or setups that I test. Why? Sometimes books are written against betas of a product, and the product team make late tweaks intended to improve the product or remove a bug. Either intentionally or unintentionally, the behavior of the system may be subtly or overtly changed.

Similarly, Microsoft is putting out updates for Windows that you can apply automatically using Windows Update or at a time of your own choosing. Many of those minor updates are intended to fix security problems, but some will affect aspects of your Windows system so that they behave differently from when the book was written. Sometimes that will affect you significantly, sometimes not.

Windows PowerShell helps to reduce the kinds of uncertainty that I mentioned in the preceding paragraphs and allows you to explore the system's actual state at the time you test it. You don't need to worry that your system might differ in some characteristic from the one I or any other author tested code on. You can find out exactly the state of your machine using ...