PowerShell 5.1 What's the newer way of creating a PSCredential object

Question

PowerShell 5.1

What's a newer way of creating the PSCredential object?

$Credential = New-Object -TypeName PSCredential -ArgumentList $_config.DBUserID, $_config.DBPassword

I was reading here that this is the legacy way of creating the object. I didn't quite understand it.

Answer 1

The link from your last comment was regarding the PSCustomObject creation specifically.

The "Legacy" approach from Microsoft Doc here was

$myHashtable = @{
    Name     = 'Kevin'
    Language = 'PowerShell'
    State    = 'Texas'
}

$myObject = New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property $myHashtable

It is still a valid way to do it and I don't see it going away anytime soon. That being said, you can cast a hashtable into a PSCustomObject directly instead, which is the preferred way. It is shorter and right to the point.

$myHashtable = @{
    Name     = 'Kevin'
    Language = 'PowerShell'
    State    = 'Texas'
}
$myObject = [pscustomobject]$myHashtable

---

My original answer, that was regarding the PSCredential specifically

The way you are creating your credentials is perfectly fine.

I personally use the [PsCredential]::New($Username,$Password) constructor but it is not a better alternative.

In fact, using the New-Object still have an advantage over using the constructor, which is that you can set properties that are not part of the constructor upon object creation, which you cannot do when using the constructor.

Here is how you create a PSCredential object using the constructor

# Name credentials
$username = 'Username'
$password = 'Password' | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force
$credential = [PSCredential]::New($username,$password)

VSCode snippet I created myself for reference

(Trivia: I named my snipped "cheap-cred" because having credentials in plain text in a script is not the best practice and it is a permanent reminder of that each time I use it.)

    "cheap-cred": {
        "prefix": "cheap-cred",
        "body": [
            "# ${1:Name} credentials",
            "\\$username = '${2:Username}'",
            "\\$password = '${3:Password}' | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force",
            "\\$credential = [PSCredential]::New(\\$username,\\$password)\r\r$0"
        ],
        "description": "Create credentials object from string within script (insecure)"
    }

Reference:

You can read about object creation in the official doc, where both method are shown, with no indication of a legacy one: about_Object_Creation