Windows PowerShell is Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

's task automation framework, consisting of a command-line

Command-line interface

A command-line interface is a mechanism for interacting with a computer operating system or software by typing commands to perform specific tasks...

 shell

Shell (computing)

A shell is a piece of software that provides an interface for users of an operating system which provides access to the services of a kernel. However, the term is also applied very loosely to applications and may include any software that is "built around" a particular component, such as web...

 and associated scripting language

Scripting language

A scripting language, script language, or extension language is a programming language that allows control of one or more applications. "Scripts" are distinct from the core code of the application, as they are usually written in a different language and are often created or at least modified by the...

 built on top of, and integrated with the .NET Framework

.NET Framework

The .NET Framework is a software framework that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large library and supports several programming languages which allows language interoperability...

. PowerShell provides full access to COM

Component Object Model

Component Object Model is a binary-interface standard for software componentry introduced by Microsoft in 1993. It is used to enable interprocess communication and dynamic object creation in a large range of programming languages...

 and WMI

Windows Management Instrumentation

Windows Management Instrumentation is a set of extensions to the Windows Driver Model that provides an operating system interface through which instrumented components provide information and notification...

, enabling administrators to perform administrative tasks on both local and remote Windows systems.

In PowerShell, administrative tasks are generally performed by cmdlets , specialized .NET classes

Class (computer science)

In object-oriented programming, a class is a construct that is used as a blueprint to create instances of itself – referred to as class instances, class objects, instance objects or simply objects. A class defines constituent members which enable these class instances to have state and behavior...

 implementing a particular operation.