MY 2014 Public POWERCLASS is Now Open for Registration

I’m going to be running a 3-day POWERCLASS April 2, 3, and 4 near Raleigh-Durham, NC! You can get full details on my company’s website, including pricing and class descriptions.
Don’t leave near Raleigh-Durham? Well, it’s a fun place, and not that expensive to visit. More importantly, I’m not going to be doing a huge road-show and visiting a bunch of cities. Right now, my schedule is almost full through _September, _so this may well be the only public class I do in 2014. It might therefore be worth your while to take a short trip!
The class will be VERY limited in size - just 16 students, max, and I’ll be happy with a bunch fewer. This is a hardcore class. We’re going to assume you’ve conquered the basics of Windows PowerShell and that you’re looking to implement best practices, start using PowerShell for real production tasks, and learn more about PowerShell performance and troubleshooting. It’s a “bring your own laptop” hands-on class, too, so you’ll get tons of hands-on time with an instructor who really cares about what you learn.
This is all-new material, and you won’t find it anyplace else. It’s applicable to v2 through v4, although some things - we WILL be covering DSC, for example - only apply to specific versions (and you’ll learn which is which as we go).
It’s the best PowerShell class I could come up with - I hope you’ll join me.

The Scripting Games Winter 2014 – Update on Event 1 Scores

Note that scorecards for the first event will not be accurate immediately on Sunday when judging closes; we have the scores in the database, but they’re not tagged in a way the system can find them. The bug has been fixed, but I need to go through and manually re-tag the first day’s scorecards, and it’s going to take a couple of days. This also affect the leaderboard display. I hope to have it fixed over the weekend. Thanks for your patience!

Scripting Games Winter 2014 – WE HAS PRIZES!!

Many thanks to SAPIEN Technologies for providing - completely without us asking - first-place and overall-best prizes for The Scripting Games!
We’ll have copies of PowerShell Studio (x2), PrimalScript (x2), and the entire SAPIEN Software Suite (x1) for our overall top-scoring team at the end of the Games. Team members can decide how to divvy up the loo themselves.
Remember that Event 1 is coming up soon:

• Instructions available 2014-01-18 00:00:00 UTC
• Entries accepted starting 2014-01-19 00:00:00 UTC
• All entries due by 2014-01-26 00:00:00 UTC

**You must be registered and on a team before we begin accepting entries, or you will not be able to participate. **Any latecomers will not be allowed to chat or upload files, even if they join a team.

PowerShell Summit North America 2014 – Some More Reasons to Register!

PowerShell Summit North America Registration is in full swing, and we’ve got about 50 more spots to reach our break-even goal. Hopefully, those of you that have been holding off for budgetary reasons are now “weapons free” and can plan to join us in April 2014!

Confirmed PowerShell Product Team Presenters

We’ve confirmed a great set of speakers from the team itself, including Jason Shirk, Lee Holmes, Kenneth Hanson, and Hemant Manhawar. Of course, Shell Father Jeffrey Snover will also be presenting a couple of sessions!
This helps really round out our agenda, along with several special events that we’ve got planned. You’ll participate in a large-scale Iron Scripter event, mix and mingle with team members in Microsoft’s “top of the world” cafe in downtown Bellevue, and rub elbows with PowerShell experts from all over the world during our pre-event mixer.

Scripting Games Winter 2014 – Team Discussion Tips

When you’re logged into the Games, you’ll notice that clicking on your team pulls up a “team discussion” box. That’s a shared discussion area for you and your team.

However, if you click on one of the files you’ve uploaded, you’ll see the discussion turn into a “File Discussion.” We retain a separate thread for each file you upload, so that you and your team can discuss that file specifically.

Scripting Games Winter 2014 – Teams in Danger

Note that as of the time of this post (about 2pm Pacific on Jan 5th), the following teams do not have enough players to participate in the upcoming Practice Event:

• Lake County Hoosiers
• A
• Annihilators
• AZPOSH
• Avengers
• PeopleTecIsAwesome
• Time Travel is Dangerous
• Kotagiris
• wow. much power. very shell.
• Blasters
• CCC
• Anteaters
• Barracudas
• Hypothermia
• Bearcats
• #PSexec
• Avalanche
• Bull Gators
• Alligators

To reiterate: **You must have 2-6 players signed into the Web site and joined to your team, or you will be unable to post entries. **Anyone joining after midnight UTC on Jan 6th will not count toward your team total for the Practice Event.
Many of the above teams are “private,” which means nobody can join them without the team invite code.
If you are on one of the following teams, especially if it’s public, _consider quitting NOW and joining another public team that needs players. _Otherwise, you may miss out on the practice event, which starts in just a couple of hours.

Script for Setting Up and Demoing a DSC Pull Server

DSC Setup and Demo Scripts
I recently set up a virtual machine to use for Desired State Configuration (DSC) demos. I wanted to make the demo-ing fairly brainless, as DSC requires a number of setup steps to get a pull server running. So I took some demo scripts Microsoft offered from TechEd 2013, updated them to work with Windows Server 2012 R2 RTM, and thought I’d offer them to you.
SetupDSC.ps1 is the main script. Now, because I didn’t want to use good ol’ Start-Demo, there’s a who crapload of kinda ugly Write-Debug statements. That way I can get an “about to do ____” message and then have the script pause before doing it. Lets me explain to the class what’s about to happen. You can remove all that crud if you like.
InstallPullServerConfig.ps1 and PSWSIISEndpoint.psm1 are the updated Microsoft scripts. SetupDSC.ps1 calls these. They’re intended to run locally; you’ll need to be _on _the machine you want to make into a pull server, and it needs to be Windows Server 2012 R2 (the DSC pull server role is part of the OS, not part of Windows Management Framework v4). Setup takes a few minutes, and will install IIS. This sets up an HTTP pull server.
SampleConfig.ps1 is a sample DSC configuration, targeted to a computer named MEMBER2. It just specifies that the Windows Server Backup feature be installed. SetupDSC.ps1 actually runs this, which produces a MOF. SetupDSC.ps1 also copies the MOF to the DSC pull server configuration directory.
SampleSetPullMode.ps1 also gets run by SetupDSC.ps1. This contains a DSC Local Configuration Manager configuration, targeted to MEMBER2, that turns on pull mode and directs MEMBER2 to pull the previously-created configuration. I think I have it refreshing every 5 minutes, which is totally unrealistic for production. Again, this was made for class demos, but you can adjust the time or leave it off to default to 30min. Running this script creates the MOF and pushes it to MEMBER2. That, in turn, causes MEMBER2 to start pulling the sample config, which causes Windows Server Backup to be installed.
SetupDSC.ps1 has some additional code to show that Windows Server Backup isn’t installed, and then is installed (after you give the pull time to occur).
Anyway, might need some tweaking to use in production, but hopefully it’ll give you a snapshot of the whole DSC process. Much thanks to James Dawson’s article on DSC, which gave me a couple of the tweaks I needed to get all this working on RTM code.
Enjoy.

Scripting Games Winter 2014 Notice

Due to some vagaries in the system, we have some users who “belong” to multiple teams.
I think I’ve corrected the problem so it won’t crop up again.
A couple of players’ team memberships were manually reduced to 1. If it was you, and you’re suddenly on the wrong team, post in the forum and I’ll fix it for you.
For everyone else, when you go to the event list you may be redirected to a “You’re on multiple teams” page, and asked to click the team you wish to remain on. Your “join date” will not change, so you’ll still be able to participate in the events. You’ll simply be de-listed from the other teams.
As always, post in the forums if you need help.

Scripting Games Winter 2014 – Practice Event Rules

On Monday, our practice event should be open at http://ScriptingGames.org.
**If you formed a team but only have one player on Monday morning, you will not be able to submit entries. **I’ve noticed several folks who have only a single player but who have set their team membership to “private,” meaning nobody can join you unless you provide them with your invitation code.
**Your team must have 2-6 players to participate in the Games. ** You may consider leaving your team (it’ll be deleted if you’re the last player in it) and joining one of the public teams. Once you join a new team, you will not be able to fully participate until the current, in-progress event is over and the next event begins.

Winter Scripting Games Team Formation in Full Swing

It looks like Team Formation is in full swing, with more than a dozen teams already registered for The Scripting Games: Winter 2014.
Some team tips:

• If you create a new team, we’re assigning it a default team name. You can immediately change that.
• Teams start as public, but we’re allowing you to make them private. This removed the team from the “join up” list, and gives you an invite code. You can distribute that invite to anyone you wish to join your team, and they can use it to sign up.
• The public team list shows a time zone offset. This is kind of the average number of minutes between you and the other people on the team. So basically, lower numbers means you’re all closer to the same time zone. You don’t necessarily NEED to be close; it depends on how you all plan to collaborate.

Right now, we have about a half-dozen public teams that you can join if you’d like to participate in the Games. Remember, a team must have at least 2 players in order to participate.
I’m loving some of the team names, like Excessive Use of -Force and Troll Bait. I know several local user groups are forming teams as well, and encouraging their members to join. You’re welcome to use email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or even standing outside and screaming as ways of recruiting members to your team.
The practice event starts Jan 6. Please pay attention to PowerShell.org’s home page for late-breaking announcements - if we have a problem, we’ll post there to let you know.
Good luck!