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• Art Beane
PowerShell for Admins

Some notes on Event 2 Advanced

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.

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• Glenn Sizemore
Scripting Games

Scripting Games Week 2: Formatting edition

This time of the year always feels like someone is holding down the fast forward button. I blinked and here we are Friday morning another week of scripts in the rear view. I spent most of my week in the beginner class this week, and was greeted by a combination of beginners and scripters who weren"™t quite ready to step up to advanced. More of the latter if I"™m to be honest.

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• Don Jones
Scripting Games

As Event 3 gets underway, here are some Event 2 stats…

Event 3 will be open for entries in about ten minutes, but I thought I’d share some Event 2 information. Keep in mind that Event 2 is open for voting until the 14th, GMT. Our Beginner Track had 120 entries this time, while the Advanced had 124. That contrasts with 165 and 159 from Event 1 - a perfectly normal falloff that’s occurred during every edition of past Games. Folks get busy, maybe get discouraged, but we’re keeping right on the trendline.

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• Bartek Bielawski

Event 2: My notes…

Today I finally had some time to look at all entries in both categories. What I liked, and what I did not like about them? You can find answers, as previously, either in Polish, or in English. I focused mainly on things I did not like, but I would anyway say that scripts are really good (overall) this year. Still: few poppies died. If you are responsible for it - remember: at the end of the day, it is you who is tossing away strength that PowerShell offers: Object Oriented Pipeline.

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• Don Jones
Scripting Games

Meet the Scripting Games Judges: Jan Egil Ring

Jan Egil Ring is a multiple-year recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award for his contributions in the Windows PowerShell technical community. He has a strong passion for Windows PowerShell, and regularly writes articles on his blog. He occasionally also writes articles for others, such as the PowerShell Magazine. As a judge in the Scripting Games, he will be writing articles on his blog reviewing both good and bad observations in the reviewed scripts.

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• Boe Prox

Scripting Games 2013: Event 2 "˜Favorite"™ and "˜Not So Favorite"™

Event 2 is in the books and with that, it is time to take a look at all of the scripts submitted and make the difficult decisions as to which ones I liked and which ones I didn’t quite like.  Just because a script landed on my “˜Not so Favorite"™ list doesn’t mean it was terrible. It was just that I felt that there were some things here and there that could have been looked at a little differently.

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• Don Jones

More Judges' Notes on Event 2

Tobias Weltner: http://www.powertheshell.com/scripting-games-task-2-commentary/ Jan Egil Ring: http://blog.powershell.no/2013/05/08/2013-scripting-games-learning-points-from-event-2/ Voting for Event 2 is going strong, and you’ve got several more days in which to vote and (most importantly) add comments. Hopefully, you’re also considering the judges’ notes and adjusting your approach for each event.

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• Art Beane
PowerShell for Admins

Notes on Beginner Event 2

 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.

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• Boe Prox

Tips on Implementing Pipeline Support

While reviewing Event 1 (and now Event 2) I’ve seen some scripts that don’t quite have the correct pipeline support and others that do a great job with it. Whether it is an unneeded Begin or End statement, or throwing everything into a Process block and not quite getting the expected output or even having a Process block when ValueFromPipeline/ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName is not even enabled. Before I start working through my notes for Event 2, I wanted to get this post out of the way.

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