An important note

There are two editions of PowerShell available today:

1. Windows PowerShell (up to v5.1, proprietary; powershell)
2. PowerShell Core (6.0+, open source; pwsh)

Windows PowerShell is based on .NET Framework, which is Microsoft's proprietary framework that Windows is built on. PowerShell began at 1.0, and was considered feature-complete at 5.1. Microsoft has stopped developing Windows PowerShell; going forward, it will only receive bug fixes.

The open source PowerShell Core 6.0 is based on the open source .NET Core. This book is about open source PowerShell. Windows PowerShell and PowerShell Core are two different entities, with two different code bases.

While PowerShell to a Windows administrator has so far meant Windows PowerShell, officially, PowerShell now means the open source PowerShell Core. In this book, we follow this convention: going forward, every mention of PowerShell points to the open source PowerShell Core 6. Windows PowerShell is referred to as Windows PowerShell.