Articles from January 2015 on PowerShell.org - Welcome Automaters!

Charlotte PowerShell User Group 2/5/2014

Mon, 26 Jan 2015 17:23:23 +0000

It has been quite a busy past couple of months and we have not had our monthly get-together. We are working to get back on track and will start in February. This month, I will be discussing IIS and PowerShell at our meeting. For those of you that do not know me, I am an IIS MVP and a PowerShell hack. I would like to tailor the discussion, demos, and examples to address specific questions or needs that the members have. You can also check out my powershell specific blogshere. Feel free to tweet to @owterri with any content requests that you have.

Look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks.

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PowerShell.org Free eBook Transition

Sun, 25 Jan 2015 13:02:48 +0000

Over the past few weeks, Matt Penny has been busy moving our free eBooks into their new home on Penflip. Code, when available, is located in our GitHub repo, and modules will soon be available in the PowerShell Gallery for downloading via Install-Module.
Penflip is a Markdown-based editing system backed by GitHub. This means anyone can contribute corrections, additional material, and so on - which will make it easier to maintain these great books over time. You can download ebooks directly from Penflip in a variety of e-book formats. We’re now focused on electronic formats, rather than traditional page-based layout, although PDF is still an available download option if you want to make a hardcopy.
The conversion from Word to Markdown was challenging and largely manual, so if you run across formatting problems (especially with code), we absolutely appreciate your help in fixing those. Simply “branch” the book, creating your own copy of the project. Make corrections, and then submit those back to the master branch. Approvals are manual, so give us a few days to review what you’ve done and merge it into the master.
Massive thanks to Matt for all the long hours making this conversion happen, and to the folks who’ve submitted cover art for the new books.

PowerShell Summit NA 2015 Agenda changes

Sun, 18 Jan 2015 16:15:59 +0000

We’ve had to make some minor changes to the Summit agenda – the revised schedule is shown on the event web site - http://eventmgr.azurewebsites.net/event/home/PSNA15

Our eBook Transition – and Your Chance to Contribute!

Sat, 17 Jan 2015 16:26:37 +0000

We’re in the process of migrating our free ebook collection over to Penflip, an online, Git-based collaborative authoring and publishing tool. Matt Penny has taken the lead in converting our Word documents to the Markdown syntax used by Penflip, and as you can see on our ebooks page, most of the titles now have an initial version in Penflip.
One neat thing about Penflip is that anyone can register for a free account, fork one of our projects, and make their own modifications. You can then submit your changes back to the master branch, so we can incorporate your changes into the ebook. This will make it easy for everyone in the community to suggest new content, offer corrections, and so on. I encourage you to help out - right now, you may simply notice some flaws from the semi-automated and fully hellish Markdown conversion, and we’d love your assistance in correcting those.
Penflip also supports on-demand downloads of each ebook in a variety of common formats, including EPUB, PDF, and more. That means you’ll always be able to grab the latest version of your favorite ebook. We’ve not yet migrated the source code that goes with some of the ebooks; the plan is to move those into our GitHub repo over the next week.
Penflip will be enabling the next generation of our ebooks, including a massive new DSC title I plan to begin working on in 2015.
Thanks for any help you can provide, and I hope you continue to find the ebooks helpful!

PhillyPoSH 01/08/2015 meeting summary and presentation materials

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 02:12:41 +0000

John Mello gave a presentation entitled “The ForEach and Where methods in Powershell v4 ”. A copy of his demo script and presentation are available here at our GitHub site. A recording of this meeting has been posted to our YouTube channel.

Let's Make a PowerShell Job Interview Quiz. C'mon and Help.

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 23:51:30 +0000

The folks atSmarterer have agreed to let us - that’s all of us, as in “The PowerShell Community” - build a sort of “exam” for people to prove their PowerShell Proficiency. And I need your help to do it!
Step 1, you need to be pretty decent with PowerShell yourself. Not Level 12 Guru Level, mind you, but you should be working with it daily.Most of this book should make sense to you.
Step 2, you need to download my Quiz Question Writing Guide (It’s all of 1 page) and Topic List. PowerShell Quiz Guidelines is the download. Go on, I’ll wait.
**Step 3, **you need to sign up, using your e-mail address, and let me know you’re interested in helping. What you’re volunteering to do is, over the course of February 2015, write at least 20 questions. That’s about 2 questions per category. You’re also agreeing to help peer-review the questions other folks write, so we can spot the stinkers. Signups are due by January 20th 2015 .

Go here to register!

**BTW, **20 questions total is only about 1 per day. You could totally do 5 per day if you made an effort. Think about PowerShell questions you’d ask during a job interview, to tell if someone knew their stuff or was merely a poser. _We cannot have too many good questions. _
**Now for the good news there are prizes! **Pluralsight is offering a prizes to the top net question contributors (“net contributor” means the number of questions you write that survive peer review and are accepted by the Quiz Captain).

1st place: $200 Amazon gift card and 6 months of access to the entire Pluralsight library
2nd place: $100 Amazon gift card and 3 months of access to the entire Pluralsight library
3rd place: $50 Amazon gift card and 1 month of access to the entire Pluralsight library

We’re also looking for a Quiz Captain, so when you register, indicate if you’re willing to take on that role. There’s only one, and you’re exempt from the prize (that’s what you get for stepping up). You’re in charge of final acceptance on all questions that go into the final pool - not so much for technical accuracy, but for being well-written.
Disclosures: You’ll be using an online authoring tool called Flock, which means your registration e-mail address (which you provide) will be provided to Smarterer, so they can load you into the tool and send you an access invite via e-mail. Your e-mail will also be used to contact you about the project, and regarding any prizes you may earn.
**WHY? **Well, the idea is that we’re all getting to a point where we’ll need to hire PowerShell sk1llz. Rather than us all concocting our own job interviews, this’ll act as a kind of central, crowdsourced job interview you could direct a job candidate to. Yes, some of you will also ask for a more in-depth interview, perhaps offering a coding challenge or something - that’s awesome. This is just the first stage you could use. The exam will be available free of charge to anyone who wants to take it, anytime, ever. And it can be updated and evolved as the technology, and our business needs, evolve.

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eBook Cover Contest

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 18:55:11 +0000

Fancy yourself a graphics person? Just like to doodle?
We’re holding a contest to create new covers for our various ebooks. Winners will receive absolutely nothing, other than a cover credit within the text (hey, we’ll also give you a full set of the ebooks for free, what the heck).

Covers must include the book title, and should include the PowerShell.org logo. The logo is below.
Don’t include author names in the artwork. Authors are credit on the book’s “About” page.
Images must be 8.5" wide by 11" high, preferably at 300dpi, in PNG or JPG format (see these specifications if you need that sizing in pixels).
Don’t include art, photos, or any other elements that you yanked off the Internet, including Microsoft imagery, unless you can provide us with written permission from the copyright holder to use it.

You can submit a series for all the books, or just covers for the book or books you like best.
Be serious. Have fun. Whatever! Send submissions via e-mail to Admin, right here at PowerShell.org. We’ll let you submit until the **end of January 2015, **and we’ll pick the best selections we have at the time.

PowerShell Summit Europe 2015–topic submissions

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 09:02:42 +0000

Topic submissions for the PowerShell Summit Europe are still open. If you want to be considered as a speaker please submit your topic very soon.
At the moment there aren’t enough submissions to enable us to put on a quality event. The 2014 European Summit was an excellent event with many good sessions – now is the time to submit your sessions. We need your sessions.
We have a policy of accepting sessions from new speakers as well as established experts. It’s not who you are but the quality of the session that counts.
Details on how to submit session proposals are available here
https://powershell.org/2014/11/24/call-for-presentations-for-powershell-summit-europe-2015/
Please submit your proposals soon as we can’t run the European PowerShell Summit without them! As a note, we are confirmed for Stockholm (or within a a short subway ride of Stockholm) for the timeframe indicated, although we don’t have the exact venue yet. It’s important that we get sessions lined up soon, so that we can begin general registration.