Creating a SHA1 Hash - Using PowerShell

I recently saw a query about how to create a SHA1 hash, using Powershell. The post was looking at using a web site for this and accessing it via PowerShell's web processing. But there is a much simpler way - just using the .NET Framework. Here's a simple script that hashes a string:

# Create Input Data 
$enc      = [system.Text.Encoding]::UTF8
$string   = "This is a string to hash< $data     = $enc.GetBytes($string)
# Create a New SHA1 Crypto Provider
$sha1 = New-Object System.Security.Cryptography.SHA1CryptoServiceProvider
# Now hash and display results 
$ResultHash = $sha1.ComputeHash($data)
$ResultHash

The trick to this approach is to convert the string into a byte array and then pass the byte array to the ComputeHash method.