Up Next: Steve Roberts from Amazon talking about the AWS Tools
Join us this Thursday, Jan 16, 2014 at 9:30 PM EST as we talk with Steve Roberts from Amazon about the AWS Tools. Read more about it here: http://aws.amazon.com/powershell/
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Can We Talk About PowerShell Core 6.0?
Microsoft recently announced the General Availability (that is, a non-beta release) of PowerShell Core 6.0. A companion document detailing breaking changes, along with some of the language in the announcement, has led to more than a few inquiries in my mailbox. Most take the tone of, “have I been wasting my time learning PowerShell?!?!?” because, at first glance, PowerShell Core looks deeply less functional than its predecessor. Let me tell you what I think.
Microsoft's Brave New World Needs Version Numbers
In Microsoft’s brave new world of agile, more-frequent software releases, including numerous pre-release cycles… Microsoft needs to rethink the way it communicates versioning. Windows Management Framework (WMF) v5 has, for me, been pretty much the perfect example of what not to do, and the perfect example of Microsoft still shoehorning itself into old nomenclature that no longer fills the bill. I know a bunch of folks on the PowerShell team are probably still trying to figure out what works, too, so this isn’t meant to be a hammer-on-’em post, but WMF5’s lifecycle was, from a versioning perspective, pretty hellish.
Verify Your PowerShell Skills
A long time ago… about a year, in fact… Jason Helmick and I started talking about a community-owned PowerShell “certification.” It went nowhere. Well, not very far.
Some background on exams: Microsoft, in my opinion, will never do a PowerShell cert. I say this having been part owner of a company that did outsourced exam development for the company. The deal is that Microsoft tries to certify _job tasks, _not _tools. _Nobody (well, maybe me) wakes up thinking, “gonna do me some PowerShell today.” No, PowerShell is the means to an end: “gonna automate me some user creation today” is more likely. And Microsoft tries to certify that end. PowerShell’s an important tool, and it already shows up on certification exams here and there.
For the most part, I agree with Microsoft’s reasoning, there. The argument can be summarized as saying “bosses don’t hire IT pros based on their ability to operate a low-level tool, they hire them to perform job tasks, which encompasses the tool.” Except that, in the case of PowerShell, I think it’d be tremendously useful for an employer to use PowerShell expertise as a discriminating factor in hiring. I mean, “someone who can automate stuff” is more valuable than “someone who can only do stuff manually,” in any situation.
So “PowerShell Verified” was intended to be a way for someone to prove - at least to themselves - that they’ve taken their PowerShell skills _to the minimum level necessary to be an effective automator. _Not a guru. Not an expert. Not Poshoholic. _Minimally effective, _who could then grow from there with experience.
So that’s what I’m going to put together.
I want to explain why I’m not using the word “Certification,” though. In my mind, certifications come from, mainly, first-parties like Microsoft. Microsoft has to jump through a lot of hoops to make sure their exam content is accurate, legally defensible, blah blah blah. They worry about security, brain dumps, and other stuff that diminishes the value of the certification. I don’t have that kind of bandwidth or their resources, so in many ways my little program will be less effective than a “real” certification. Plus, few bosses will give a rat’s patooty what that Don Jones guy said about your skillz (I can’t even convince bosses to buy you guys 12-core 64GB workstations for your desk). So my “Verified” program is going to be _low stakes, _meaning you take it to prove something to _
yourself
_.
Here’s how this is going to go.