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We’re often asked if we’re planning to have a PowerShell Summit in (insert name of town/country/city). The answer is, “no,” because we’re usually not planning much in advance of whatever’s currently on the table. Keep in mind - **we’re all volunteers. **We don’t have a ton of free time to plan 3 years out! As you’ll see in a minute, it’s a lot of work. That said, you can play a big role in bringing the Summit to your town.
As we move into the middle of PowerShell Summit Europe 2014, we have a lot of folks asking, “when will you hold a Summit in ____” (insert the name of your favorite country). Right now, PowerShell.org is committed to organizing both North American and European events, one per year, while there is audience demand for them. Both events will shift locations from year to year, and the location choice is driven by a number of criteria - mainly financial ones.
On Monday night (Amsterdam time, September 29th), we’ll be holding the first DSC Hackathon at PowerShell Summit Europe 2014. Attached are the scenarios we’ll be asking participants to select from. We’ll ask everyone to work in small groups, pick one scenario, and try to produce a custom DSC resource that solves the problem. Many of these are from Microsoft’s own internal “wish list” of resources that they don’t yet have anyone assigned to.
If you’re planning to attend PowerShell Summit North America 2015, to be held at the end of April 2015 in Charlotte, North Carolina, you should read the following important information: The registration site will be open from 30 October 2014 to 30 March 2015. There is about a 30-day window from the end of registration to the event itself. There are no exceptions to this cutoff. You should read the extremely important information about registering.
Aside from classes and new DSC features, which I’ve already written about, there are a number of less-headline, but still-very-awesome, new capabilities. This article is based on the September 2014 preview release of WMF 5.0. Information is highly subject to change. First up is the **ability to automatically create PowerShell cmdlets from an OData endpoint. **Huh? OData is a kind of web service (basically); PowerShell gains the ability to look at the endpoint and construct a set of proxy cmdlets that let you interact with the endpoint more naturally.
When Desired State Configuration (DSC) came out - gosh, just about a year ago - I kept telling people that there was more to come. And a lot of it is now just around the corner in PowerShell v5. This article is written to the September 2014 preview release - things may change for the final release. A major set of changes in DSC is a much more detailed and granular configuration of the Local Configuration Manager (LCM), the local “agent” that makes DSC work on the target node.
This post is based on the September 2014 preview release of WMF 5.0. This is pre-release software, so this information may change. One of the banner new features in PowerShell v5 is support for real live .NET Framework class creation in Windows PowerShell. The WMF 5.0 download’s release notes has some good examples of what classes look like, but I wanted to briefly set some expectations for the feature, based on my own early experiences.
We’re hoping that everyone attending the PowerShell Summit Europe 2014 will join our Monday evening **DSC Hackathon, **where we’ll become “product team members for a night” and try to code up some DSC Resources from the team’s own internal wish list! We’ll provide a cash bar as well as finger food for our on-site attendees… but you’re welcome to participate remotely, too! Sometime on September 29th, watch PowerShell.org for a posting that includes the challenges.
Did you know that PowerShell.org has, for more than a year now, offered a mostly-monthly TechLetter e-mail newsletter? It’s stuffed with community news, announcements (like our free webinar schedule), feature articles on PowerShell, and much more. It’s a great way to learn a little bit at a time, and it’s truly awesome content. And we keep back issues for your perusal! You can find the back issues online. We post all but the most recent 2-3 issues, but of course you can subscribe and have them delivered right to your inbox around the middle of most months.
I know it’s been a “wish” of many folks for our forums to have better code formatting. Well, if you know some PHP and a little about WordPress, you can make it happen. What we need is a WordPress plugin that hooks the action for post displays. The plugin needs to take the post body, and look for anything contained within HTML “code” tags or “pre” tags. Within that content, the plugin needs to strip any further code/pre tags (WordPress has a bit of a glitch where it’ll sometimes nest them).