How to reference PSCredential.Empty in powershell script

Question

I am trying to use empty credentials for anonymous access. How to I set a variable to empty credentials. I am trying to use PSCredential.Empty Property

Answer 1

Santiago Squarzon has provided the solution:

[pscredential]::Empty

is the PowerShell equivalent of C#'s PSCredential.Empty, i.e. access to the static Empty property of the System.Management.Automation.PSCredential type.

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PowerShell's syntax for accessing .NET types and their - instance or static - member:

• In order to refer to a .NET type by its literal name in PowerShell, you must specify it as a type literal, which is the type name enclosed in [...]

  • [pscredential] works as-is, even in the absence of a
    using namespace System.Management.Automation statement, because it happens to be a type accelerator, i.e. a frequently used type that you can access by a short, unqualified name (which can, but needn't be the same name as that of the type it references; e.g., [xml] is short for System.Xml.XmlDocument).

  • Generally, you either need a using namespace statement if you want to use the unqualified name only, or you need to use the namespace-qualified type name; e.g., [System.Management.Automation.PSCredential] or - given that the System. component is optional - [Management.Automation.PSCredential]

  • For a complete discussion of PowerShell's type literals, see this answer.

• While instance members of .NET types are accessed with . (member-access operator), just like in C#, accessing static members requires a different operator: ::, the static member-access operator.

  • A distinct operator is necessary, because type literals are objects themselves, namely instances of System.Reflection.TypeInfo, so that using . accesses the latter's instance properties; e.g. [pscredential].FullName returns the type's namespace-qualified name.

Also note that, in keeping with PowerShell's general case-insensitive nature, neither type literals nor member names need be specified case-exactly.