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When I read the instructions for event 6, I thought that here’s a tough one. A lot of competitors won’t have access to a test environment with Windows Server 2012 and Virtual Machines that they can actually work with. So, I expected that many of the entries wouldn’t get tested and intended to forgive minor errors that would have shown up in testing. Well, there was one thing that really surprised me.
Into the home stretch and the entries just keep getting better! The only advice I’d like to offer this time is to be careful to read the instructions carefully. They included the specific folder where the files were located and I noticed several misinterpretations in the scripts. Some included a mandatory Path parameter and others had a default Path that was not the specified folder. Including an optional Path with the correct default would certainly be acceptable, but not those variations.
 Wow! That’s the only word I can think of to describe the submissions this time. I’m really impressed with the approaches taken to solve this problem. The only thing that could have been better is quitting when the ActiveDirectory module or the Quest snapin weren’t found. I chalked that up to not having experience with an actual audit where no answer is not acceptable, so I didn’t count against it when evaluating the scripts.
This event’s entries are impressive. Scoring appears to be higher than in the earlier events, so this one must have been easier to solve. So this time, instead of talking about good and bad scripts, I’m going to comment on some of the techniques I saw. There was some “conversation” over whether Win32_Volume or Win32_LogicalDisk was the better approach to take. Fact is, either will return the requested data. So it really doesn’t matter which one you use.
I hate to seem negative, but I’ve noticed a few things about a number of the advanced entries that seem like folks didn’t read the instructions, or just weren’t careful about details. There were a surprising number of entries that had [string]$ComputerName instead of [string[]]$ComputerName in the params section and then went on to treat the parameter as if it were an array. Somewhat related to the array issue, the problem statement indicated that there could be several files that had computer identification for piping into the solution.
 First of all, congratulations! It looks to me like a lot of learning is going on; the 2nd event entries look really good to me. I especially liked the way a number of you built up a one-liner by starting with a_ Get-WmiObject Win32_ComputerSystem -ComputerName (Get-Content file.txt)_ and piping it into Select-Object to generate the data. However, there were a couple of areas within the Select block that make me think that some more discussion of what $_ means in a pipeline would be helpful.
 A lot of you have been working too hard at solving the problem (both beginner and advanced). Some of this is clearly related to trying to offer a very complete solution but some look like attempts to write extra clever or elegant code. In the “real world”, there"™s probably not enough time or interest in putting lots of effort into these extras. The minimum it takes to achieve the goal is most often good enough.