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

Charlotte PowerShell User Group Meeting–3/5/2015

Fri, 27 Feb 2015 18:52:15 +0000

We will be bringing you a presentation by Jason Walker, @AutomationJason, at our next meeting. Jason will be discussing the Anatomy of a DSC Resource. The session will dive into the anatomy of a DSC resource and will provide an understanding of what it takes to develop your own DSC resources.

Food and drinks will be provided. Everyone is welcome. Please RSVP on the MeetUp event page so we can plan food accordingly.

PowerShell Summit Europe Registration

Fri, 20 Feb 2015 14:35:03 +0000

Registration for PowerShell Summit Europe will commence on February 27th, 2015 at roughly 12:01am server time (I believe the server is in a Pacific time Azure datacenter). We will be limited to roughly 100 attendees.
I want everyone to understand the basic rules of engagement for this. Setting up and running this event involves significant financial risk. While in this case the event venue, a Microsoft office in Kista (near Stockholm), Sweden, isn’t charging us huge fees and requiring us to commit to hotel rooms and the like, there is still risk. _Most of that risk is not borne by PowerShell.org, _but for the most part by myself, personally. Our speakers also commit to covering their own travel expenses (something we’re hoping to offset this year). In addition, PowerShell team members are taking time away from the product to attend, which is a huge logistical commitment because it’s such a relatively small team.
For the Europe 2014 event, we had very poor registration numbers almost until the last minute. We also had to work very hard to drum up topic submissions from European speakers. Those two facts worry us a lot, because it suggests that there isn’t a strong and engaged community interested in this event. If that’s the case, we don’t want to barge in and run the event at all. As a result, we’re going to be taking a pretty risk-averse approach this time, and I wanted to be up-front and forthright about it.
So: We’re going to evaluate the registration numbers and velocity in mid-April. By then, we need to see at least 20-30 registrations. (We usually achieve that in the first week of registrations for the North American event.) If we’re not hitting that level, then the event is subject to cancellation (and everyone will naturally get a full and complete refund).
Also know that, should we make it past that point, registration will end by August 15th 2015 or when we fill the available space, whichever comes first. In other words, last-minute registration won’t be a thing.
The success of this event **depends on the European members of the overall PowerShell community. ** You need to help get the word out. We aren’t going to be advertising, soliciting Microsoft’s help, or other techniques. This isn’t a commercial conference; it’s being done by the community and for the community - and if the community can’t make it happen, then it won’t happen.
Our agenda will be going online shortly, and you should head to http://PowerShellSummit.org to find the registration links (after reading the introductory material, click “Europe 2015” for details). We’ll get it all posted and ready for February 27th - it won’t be live until then. **Help us get the word out. **Tell co-workers. Use Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. Attend user group meetings and spread the word. We’ve got about 6 weeks to get 20-30 people signed up to make sure we’re covering base expenses and making this happen.

NJ PowerShell UG Meeting March 5th: Presenter Adam Bertram

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 18:59:59 +0000

The NJ PowerShell User Group is having a meetup on Thursday, March 6th from 6:00 - 8:00 PM. The first half hour will be for socializing, pizza, and playing pool at our coffee bar.

Registration:EventBrite You must register to attend in person.

Agenda:

6:00 – 6:30: Pizza and socializing

6:30 – 7:30: Presentation

7:30 - 8:00: Q & A

Please note that the Webex meeting will start at 6:00 PM, but the actual presentation won’t start until 6:30

. In-Person a

ttendees must register, print out their EventBrite ticket, and present it at the door. Walk-ins will not be permitted.

Presenter: Adam Bertram

**Bio: ** Adam has been in the IT industry since 1998 and has mostly focused his career on Microsoft technologies. He’s a child of autoexec.bat and batch menus, graduated to VBscript 10 years ago and made his way to Powershell 3 years ago. Adam’s passion is breaking complicated problems down and developing creative solutions using Powershell. Due to his experience with Microsoft’s Configuration Manager he’s been known to write a lot of scripts around software management.

Presentation Description:

Managing Software Installs with Powershell

If you’ve ever tried to script a software install or uninstall to a lot of different applications you’ll know how hard it can be. Every piece of software seems to work in a different manner. This talk will go over a Powershell module I’ve created that allows me to easily find, install and uninstall MSIs, InstallShield and other EXE installers. It also has the ability to perform various cleanup routines and perform many other functions necessary for the software to work as you would expect.

Twitter:@adbertram

Coffee Bar, Pool Table, and XBox

Conference Room

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Design the Next Scripting Games

Mon, 09 Feb 2015 15:03:49 +0000

We have some folks working on the next Scripting Games… but we want some feedback from the community to make sure we’re offering something of value.
The current plan is to run a series of events, with both Beginner and Intermediate tracks. There will be no “advanced” track; the feeling is that, if you’re advanced, you should be helping out by judging ;). Events will be constructed as a combination of puzzles and real-world tasks, meaning some things will simply test your PowerShell skills, while others will test them in a more production-applicable way.
What we need from the community is some sense of what you want to get from the Games. However, before you reply, understand what is NOT on the table: we will not be running an event where every entry gets personal commentary or feedback from an expert judge. It simply isn’t practical - everyone doing the judging has a full-time job, and offering personal feedback just isn’t feasible.
What COULD be on the table is offering a numeric score from a judge, based on the completeness of your entry and what the judge thinks of it. However, if it’s a low score, you’re not going to be told why (“no commentary,” see above). So we’re not sure that numeric scores are useful.
One proposal has been to post the events, and have judges select both good ones and less-good ones to write about. In other words, provide commentary on the outstanding entries, but not EVERY entry. Individual entries wouldn’t receive a score, but you could certainly compare what you did to the outstanding ones that did receive commentary. The idea here is to give you a task on which to test your skills, and to provide some educational feedback on some representative entries. The fact is that, in any given task, we tend to see a lot of similar-looking entries anyway, so hopefully taking some of them and commenting (both positively and constructively) will help everyone “judge” their own entries and improve their skills.
After trying numerous approaches to the Games over the past years, and after listening closely to people’s feedback, we’re trying to come up with something that is both useful and do-able.
What do you think of that proposal? Or, would you offer another proposal for us to build the Games around? Keep in mind - any proposal that suggests “expert commentary on every entry” will simply have to be turned down outright. After major discussion, we simply can’t commit to it. We’ll leave this open for the month of February 2015 - discuss away!
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