Articles from April 2017 on PowerShell.org - Welcome Automaters!

PowerShell and DevOps Global Summit Recap

Fri, 21 Apr 2017 19:57:12 +0000

Now that I’m recovered from the 2017 PowerShell and DevOps Global Summit, I just wanted to take a moment and talk about my experiences at the conference. It was my first time attending this conference and it was also my first time speaking. Both “firsts” contributed to a range of emotions throughout the long and exhausting week.

I came in to Seattle late Friday night and expected to go straight to the hotel and to bed. Being from Eastern Daylight Time makes for a long day and late night when your expected hotel arrival time is 10pm local time (or 1AM your time). However, PowerShell friends and community members, some of whom I knew from previous conferences and some of whom I was just meeting for the first time, greeted me. Some stayed up and waited for me to arrive – even with an already-closed hotel bar and many respective time zone differences. They greeted me with an overwhelming sense of community and friendship, and that was a defining moment that I’ll never forget. Even though I was exhausted, I found myself staying up for a couple more hours chatting with folks who were already there.

Saturday was a do-my-own-thing kind of day. My intent of being there a day early was to try to relax and not fret about the upcoming presentation the next day, but also try to review the presentation a bit with my co-presenter Jason Helmick. I tried to stay stress-free by working out – I am an avid Crossfitter and there is a Crossfit box within walking distance of the hotel, so I got a workout in and a lot of coffee via the Starbucks in the hotel. Had a quiet dinner with a fellow DevOps Camper and also met another attendee who was sitting next to us at the sushi place. A couple glasses of wine later, I was ready to retire to get ready for the next day.

Sunday, of course, began very early with heart palpitations and equipment checks. I have a brand new laptop, and while I may be good at PowerShell, I’m technologically challenged when it comes to hooking up my new laptop to the projection equipment.

Plus there’s some recording equipment in there too, so I hand my laptop and a bunch of cables to other really smart people and they get it all hooked up.

All I can think of is “in an hour you will be standing up here talking for 3 hours”, and I should mention here that Jeffrey Snover himself is not only in the building, but has taken up shop in a seat in our session. I’m cool, calm and collected, of course!

After breakfast, Jason opens the show by talking first about teaching DSC, then about our Autolab project, which is a source of pride for me. He then segues into my portion of the presentation, which includes configuration data tricks, and developing your own resources using script, function-based, and class-based resources. After a short break, we talk about Pull, Tug, and reporting with DSCEA. Many of my demos don’t work – even though I had just run through them less than a week ago – and I realize why. If you’ve ever seen a talk by Sami Laiho, you know the rule - you need to sacrifice a Nano server to the demo gods to have a successful demo, and I’ve forgotten this simple rule.

After the morning session I get to revert back to being an attendee somewhat.

Don Jones is presenting the afternoon session on Pester, and while I think my name and a couple of others were on the agenda for this session along with Don, Don is Don, and presents an enlightening session on the use of Pester. I end the day with my friends taking me out to dinner to celebrate completion of my first speaking session and more wine and socialization with the PowerShell community members hanging out at the hotel bar.

On Monday, the day started off with Don’s keynote presentation and Ask Me Anything with Jeffrey Snover. I got to sit next to the Scripting Wife, who, along with the Scripting Guy, were both called up to the stage and honored for their many contributions to the PowerShell Community. There are so many fun people to meet and converse with at this conference. The one thing I did have a hard time with was names – and later did I realize that I “knew” a lot of people from their twitter or slack handles and never really actually knew their real names.

(Yes, you, @bladefirelight.)

The “Ask Me Anything” session was interesting and entertaining, and it’s always fun to hear about Jeffrey’s favorite open-source project (VSCode and Pester), anticipated uses of classes and PowerShell on Linux. Nothing shocked me more than having my upcoming PKI session mentioned by Jeffrey during the AMA though!!

And then the time change and lack of sleep started to hit me. I took a quick nap in the afternoon and returned in time for the PowerShell Team’s lightning demos to give me a glimpse into what was coming next in PowerShell. After that I mingled and got to talk to members of the PowerShell team during the welcome reception.

Fast-forward to Tuesday, it’s the day I’ve been looking forward to the most, but also the most nerve-wracking, because it’s the day of my PKI presentation. In the morning I attended the session of the three fairies/furries/furies, which was a more impromptu session discussing less-than-optimal practices in PowerShell usage.

After a session on using PowerShell on Linux, my nerves were getting the best of me and I took a break and had some informal conversation with people outside the sessions. I did attend part of the Chocolatey session in the afternoon and I wish I had been able to pay attention enough to that session, but at that point, I stopped trying to absorb new information and just mentally rehearsed from that point until I went on. I am disappointed that I didn’t get to see “The Path to a DSC Resource Module” and the PowerShell Team session on security so here’s hoping there may be recordings of those sessions!

The show went great. I may have forgotten half my intro (you’d never know!) but other than that I was pleased with the presentation and even more entertained by the follow-up discussions I had afterwards. And many of them were “hey, we’re really glad to see that everyone struggles from time to time on how to solve something with DSC.”

I also received some interesting feedback on how to make my session better and I’m always open to constructive criticism. After that I think I was mentally shot, but still managed to go out and enjoy Tuesday night’s social event and more wine-drinking at the hotel.

Then Wednesday came and with it, the sheer exhaustion of the previous days caught up with me. I wanted to sleep in, but I also really wanted to see Ashley’s session on the Kerberos Double Hop problem since that bit me a lot during development of the PKI code. After that early morning session, I just hung out and talked to people rather than attending formal sessions, and I enjoyed answering people’s questions – everything from my career story to questions about PKI to questions about how to solve particular problems they have with DSC.

For my last session, I participated in a panel discussion on Introducing DevOps to your Organization with Steve Murawski and Jason Helmick.

And while I know the challenges my former organization faced, it was refreshing to hear questions from others about different challenges and discuss potential solutions.

So now the big question:

Would I return to the PowerShell and DevOps Global Summit again next year? The answer is a big “hell yes”. Will I speak again? Absolutely. I’d like to thank every one of the attendees for giving me a warm welcome into the PowerShell community as a member and a speaker. It was the non-judgmental atmosphere that is perfect for a first-time speaker. How about you? Are YOU interested in speaking but are afraid to try? Do it. Submit a session. Sign up for the Community Lightning Demos and show something you’re working on. Don’t be afraid and give it a try, since this conference open and welcoming to everyone in the community.

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Colecting Certificates form an Enterprise CA for use with DSC

Fri, 21 Apr 2017 16:29:24 +0000

In a domain environment auto enrollment can be used to get create unique certificates for each node that can be used with DSC. The problem is getting the public cert to the machine that creates the DSC MOF files. I wrote a module last year to collect them directly form the Enterprise CA. If it interests you take a look https://blog.bladefirelight.com/nuggets/collecting-ca-certificates-for-dsc-configuration/

Serve on the Board of PowerShell.org!

Mon, 17 Apr 2017 13:59:56 +0000

The DevOps Collective (the nonprofit that owns PowerShell.org) is organized into two main governing bodies. Our Directors - myself, Christopher Gannon, Jason Helmick, Jeffery Hicks, Richard Siddaway, and Will Anderson - run the organization on a day-to-day. On Board, which we’re now forming, consists of stakeholders who help advise us on directions, priorities, and so on. We want our Board to be diverse, and include representation from industry as well as community. This is a fairly convention nonprofit governance setup; you’ll find, for example, many Chambers of Commerce organized this way.
“Community” has been the bit we’ve struggled with, and so we’ve decided to simply put it to the community to help come up with an answer. We’d like two “at-large” seats, filled by community members on a rotating (annual) basis. The responsibilities are not huge: mainly, we’ll have a virtual meeting once or twice a year to cover our current activities and discuss priorities. On an ongoing basis, the Board is also a way for outside concerns to have a voice within the organization.
For our community seats, we want people who are actively engaged with the community on a daily basis. We want to know what’s happening out there with the people who actually use PowerShell, and who are participating in DevOps. We want to be aware of what’s going on in the OSS world, and where we, as an organization, might be able to assist.
So if that’s you, reach out to me. Drop an email to DonJ (and the domain is listed right in the address bar of your browser right now). If you know of someone, please reach out to them and have them send me an email. I’d like to know a bit about you, how you’re present in the community on an ongoing basis, and some ideas you have for what The DevOps Collective should be focusing its time and funding on (especially educationally, as that’s our main mission).
I look forward to hearing from you!

PowerShell Saturday Booster Program

Fri, 14 Apr 2017 16:23:29 +0000

As announced at PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2017, we’re preparing a “PowerShell Saturday Booster Program” to help launch and support local one-day events. Please visit https://github.com/devops-collective-inc/powershell-saturday/wiki to take a look at our draft materials, and use GitHub’s “Issues” feature to submit questions, suggestions for additional content, requests for clarification, and so on. We’ll continue to build this out, but want to make sure we’re doing so in a way that makes sense to the community. Thanks for your input! Our goal is to have this up and running by the end of June, 2017.

Post-Summit Note

Thu, 13 Apr 2017 21:30:54 +0000

A quick note: We experienced some massive equipment failures this year, almost to the point where we were starting to seriously question our life choices. The end result is that we don’t have as many session recordings as we’d hoped. Jason will be going through what we do have over the next week, splicing together what we can, and posting it to the YouTube channel. We appreciate everyone’s patience and understanding.

Do Anything in One Line of PowerShell

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 21:30:23 +0000

PowerShell provides a tremendous boon to productivity for computer professionals of all types. But, you have to admit: it can be a bit daunting to get up to speed! Indeed, as someone who has a fair amount of experience using it, I still find myself having to look up how to do things–frequently. So I started keeping track of the recipes I was using the most. And came up with a list of 400 or so, published in 4 parts.

Though I actually wrote these a couple years back they are certainly still relevant today, just covering a bit less of the ever-expanding PowerShell universe of discourse!
(Note that at the end of each web article listed above is a link to download it as a PDF that is more tidily formatted.)

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Final agenda

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 10:14:34 +0000

We’ve had to move a few sessions around for various reasons.
The online agenda at https://eventloom.com/event/home/summit2017 shows the current final agenda.
Please check the agenda carefully to ensure you don’t miss any sessions

Submit Questions for "Ask Me Anything" with Jeffrey Snover

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 11:47:45 +0000

In just a week, we’ll be holding a live “Ask Me Anything” with Jeffrey Snover at PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2017. Now’s a great time to Help us queue up questions - drop yours in the comments below!
We’ll be doing our level best to record the session, although it will not be live-streamed. We’ll post the recording and let everyone know where it is a week or so after the event.
**UPDATE: **We’re no longer taking new questions. Thanks to everyone who submitted, and we’ll see you at Summit (where we’ll be taking more questions live).