Now that we are familiar with what an object is, what it’s made up of – properties and methods – and how we can work with them, it’s time to create our own objects!

To create an object, we use the New-Object cmdlet like so:

$dog = New-Object -TypeName PSCustomObject

The -TypeName PSCustomObject means the object has the type of PSCustomObject, a class used for creating custom objects.

By default, the new dog custom object has no properties and four methods.

Adding Properties

With the object created, we can now use the Add-Member cmdlet to add methods and properties. We must specify the type of member we wish to add.

In the case of a property with key-value pair, we use a NoteProperty. Consider the example below.

$dog | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name "Name" -Value "Rufus"
$dog | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name "Age" -Value 10

Our custom dog object now has two properties:

1. Name with the string value of Rufus
2. Age with the integer value of 10

Adding Methods

The syntax for adding a method is very similar to that of properties. However, for the MemberType parameter, we use ScriptMethod.

$dog | Add-Member -MemberType ScriptMethod -Name "speak" -Value { Write-Host "Woof!"}

Just like a property, we name the method "speak" using -Name. For -Value we enclose a line of code, which outputs the string Woof!.

Now we can use the newly created method:

$dog.speak()
# outputs: Woof!