A Windows Feature PowerShell Challenge

It is time for a new set of challenges. Please feel free to post a comment with links back to your solutions and work on previous challenges. The Chairman doesn’t want to get into a position of having to provide solutions because there’s no guarantee it would be any “better” than yours. If your code runs and meets the criteria that should be good enough. Hopefully, you will pick up new ideas and techniques from other people’s work or even from reading the help.
This challenge is centered on the idea of creating a unified command to enable or disable an optional feature on a Windows 10 desktop like Containers. Obviously, your first challenge is to discover what PowerShell commands you can incorporate into your function. The Chairman is leaning towards a single command that sets a Windows optional feature to be either enabled or disabled. Additional criteria will be imposed on intermediate and advanced levels.

Beginner

If you are at the beginner level you should write a function that allows the user to specify a single Windows optional feature as a parameter value and whether to enable or disable it on the local host. If the feature is already in the desired state, you might want to display a message to the user informing them that no changes are being made.

Intermediate

Building on the beginner requirements, let the user specify multiple features on the local host via a parameter and through the pipeline. Parameter validation is encouraged. Your function should support -WhatIf and incorporate the logging features of the underlying commands. Your function should include appropriate error handling.

Advanced

Building on the intermediate requirements, let the user specify running the command to set one or more Windows optional features on multiple remote computers. As a bonus, auto-complete the feature names for the user.

You are encouraged to push yourself and meet the criteria beyond your comfort level. Again, you are encouraged to post a comment with links to your work. No code samples or solutions will be published.

Good Scripting!


One Reply to “A Windows Feature PowerShell Challenge”

Comments are closed.