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We’re pleased to announce the winners for Event 5 of The Scripting Games 2013! Remember that Event 6 is now open for community voting, and that Event 6 opens up near the end of this week. That’ll be your last chance to contribute, and shortly after TechEd we’ll announce the overall winners. Good luck! Winners: You can log into The Scripting Games Web site and go to your Profile page to see your prize.
Yesterday at TechEd North America, Jeffrey Snover and Kenneth Hansen began describing features to be delivered with PowerShell v4 in Windows Server 2012 R2 (the company has not yet announced availability dates for either). In particular, a new feature called Desired State Configuration promises to become the foundation for some pretty serious expansion. Essentially, DSC lets administrators write a declarative “script” that describes what a computer should look like. PowerShell takes that, matches the declarative components with underlying modules, and ensures that the computer does, in fact, look like that.
With week 5 in the books, I can see that everyone just continues to grow and show some great submissions. Of course, nothing is perfect and can always show areas of improvement, but trust me, you are all doing an excellent job! I was hoping to have this article completed prior to now, but between a flight to Tech Ed and forgetting my power cord for the laptop, I am just now getting this accomplished.
We’ve still got, oh, about 48 hours or so for Event 6 submissions, and then of course voting and judging. But I wanted to take a second and let you know what this year’s Games looked like: We’ve logged over 1,100 entries. Almost 13,000 votes. More than 6,700 comments. That’s a lot - and it’ll all be archived once the final votes are tallied and prizes awarded. There will be ZIP files of entries for each track and event, and I encourage you to download them over the Summer - we won’t necessarily archive them permanently.
I can honestly say that the interactions that I"™ve had with the PowerShell community over the past five years have been some of the most fulfilling. There is something to watching someone learn to script. Some plateau artificially mainly because they don"™t want to leave the GUI. Often they"™re forced into learning PowerShell and stubbornly go into trying to learn as little as possible. If you competed this year you do not fall into that category.
I loved this week"™s challenge as it had the right wiggle room to bring out the best in our participants. Of course, this is also the point in the games when we start to get everyone"™s “A” game. At this point even our new competitors are all warmed up and in the zone, and let me tell you the entries this week show it!   I want to start with the beginners as I actually ran almost every entry this week.
At the last TechMentor (in Orlando), I did a Windows PowerShell pre-conference workshop. The conference was kind enough to let me record it - I basically just used Camtasia, so this isn’t a professional video by any stretch, but it gives you an idea of what a TechMentor conference is like. Obviously, my focus was on the folks in the room, but you can see all of the demos and hear me pretty clearly.
Find ’em at http://www.powertheshell.com/scripting-games-task-5-commentary/
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.
So what’s with the “super secret” PowerShell session being given by Jeffrey Snover at TechEd 2013? First, if you’ll be in New Orleans, plan to attend this. The deal is pretty simple: Microsoft has got a lot of information pertaining to v.Next under embargo, which means people can’t talk about it yet, or even tell you the title of the session. But trust me, if you’re interested in the world of DevOps (and if you use PowerShell, you are), you’ll want to be at this session.
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