I’ve been making some more programming changes to the Scripting Games, based on folks’ feedback. If you run into problems, please notify me via the Feedback Forums link at the bottom of every page on the site. Use the email address provided. Don’t post a comment here, because I might not see it quickly.
Multiple comments per reviewer - you can now leave multiple comments on an entry. Combined with the ability to mark your comment as pertaining to a line or range of lines, this should allow for more granular commenting.
Comment without voting - you are now free to offer comments without offering a score.
Delete comments - you can now delete the comments you have written.
I’m still plugging away at some IE9/10-related errors, which are causing the code reviewer/voter/commenter to not display on some entries. In the meantime, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox seem to be working fine.
Bartosz (Bartek) Bielawski is a busy IT Administrator with an international company, PAREXEL. He loves PowerShell and automation. That love earned him the honor of Microsoft MVP. He shares his knowledge mainly on his blogs: in English (http://becomelotr.wordpress.com) and Polish (http://powershellpl.net) and through articles published in the Polish IT Professional (http://it-professional.pl) magazine. He is co-author of PowerShell Deep Dives book (http://www.manning.com/hicks/). He loves good code that takes advantage of PowerShell pipeline and advanced functions grouped in modules.
We’re pleased to announce the winners for Event 2 of The Scripting Games 2013! Winners: You can log into The Scripting Games Web site and go to your Profile page to see your prize. You will be given a prize redemption code and either a URL where you can redeem it, or an e-mail address of the prize provider (they will need the redemption code). All prizes must be claimed by the end of July 2013. I will list winners by username; if you used your e-mail address as your username, then a portion of that will be truncated for your privacy. Anyone can log in and check their Profile page to see if they’ve won a prize.
The PowerShell Summit North America 2014 will be held April 28, 29, and 30 at the Meydenbauer Center on Northeast 6th Street in Bellevue, WA. Your membership in the PowerShell Summit also makes you a yearlong member of PowerShell.org, the online hub for the PowerShell community. Membership includes a daily continental breakfast, daily hot lunch, and three tracks of expert-led lectures and discussions. 2014 tracks include:
INTERNALS: Inner secrets of PowerShell, suitable for developers and admins alike.
DEEP DIVES: Dig into technically rich topics related to the shell itself and broad administrative tasks.
DOMAIN SPECIFIC: Focus on managing specific server products and technologies using the shell.
[NB: For tax reasons, you become a “member” of the organization and go to our meeting as part of that; we don’t sell “tickets.”] Pricing will range from $750-$950. We’d originally hoped to do a flat price, but the logistics of our venue is pushing this decision. So we’ll be offering discounted tickets first, and then moving up the price as we go. Get in early to get the cheap seats! If you choose to stay at one of our official hotels, you’ll enjoy a reduced room rate, complimentary in-room Internet, and a short 15-minute walk to the Meydenbauer Center. We recommend taking a shuttle from the airport (http://bit.ly/ZNWGcw $20oneway; taxis $65+) instead of a rental car; parking is NOT complimentary. NEARBY HOTELS include: Sheraton (http://bit.ly/10mVQog), Hilton (http://bit.ly/YsQiq8), and Red Lion (http://bit.ly/10gXH8v). All are adjacent to each other and are a .6 mile walk to the Meydenbauer Center. Courtyard by Marriott (http://bit.ly/12RvG9a) is across the street from the Meydenbauer Center. We do not yet have official room availability and rates. These hotels are also less than a 4-minute taxi ride (under $5oneway) to downtown Bellevue, full of retail, dining, bars, and nightlife. You will probably spend MORE on a rental car (around $100 best-case, plus parking fees and fuel). We will have a small-bandwidth Internet pipe available for WiFi use at the conference center. We recommend that you NOT rely on it for mission-critical or business-sensitive tasks, as it is a shared pipe and will likely have poor performance during peak usage. We are not currently planning to offer power outlets in rooms. You may NOT stretch power cords across walkways to plug in your laptop. We are seeking out a Power Sponsor - the cost to have enough power for everyone’s laptop is about $20,000 (it’s one way conference centers make their profits), so this is a significant expense. We are planning a brief private meet-and-greet reception for PowerShell.org, Inc. shareholders. We are also planning general evening events. MEMBERSHIP SALES WILL BEGIN IN JULY with a private announcement to our 2013 alumni and our shareholders. After that, we will offer a block of memberships to our TechLetter subscribers. These folks will have first dibs not only on the event, but also on our limited block of nearby and discounted hotel rooms. We will release subsequent blocks in 2013 and 2014 for the public. FULL DETAILS will always be available online at http://PowerShellSummit.org (this will redirect to the appropriate page for information and news). UPDATE: I know there’s a bit of disappointment that we’re not “on campus.” First… understand that we were a little under-the-radar in 2013, in terms of outside groups doing what we did in those particular locations. We also need to grow the event a bit in order to make it financially self-sustaining. And, the real clincher, no place “on campus” could accommodate us. However, “campus” (this is why I keep putting it in quotes) spans Redmond and Bellevue - we’re actually adjacent to Microsoft offices, in 2014, and we’re scheduling an evening event (community/team mixer, with team Q&A stations) in MS facilities. We’ll also try to wrangle a company store/museum visit (there’s a company Connector Shuttle that runs to Commons, which is where the store and museum are located). Most importantly, our location will ensure team participation - which is what doing this in the Seattle metro was all about. In fact, we’re planning expanded team participation, with the addition of team-led “lightning demos” that will highlight cool features and tricks, and which will be a prelude to that evening’s community/team mixer (so you can ask follow-up questions in smaller groups). So… given all of the possible alternatives, we felt this was the best solution. After all, the main session content is just you sitting in a room - shouldn’t matter where that room is. The big thing for us is the team engagement, and the opportunity to do fun stuff on campus, and we think we’ve got that nailed. More to come.
I want to point out some changes that are being made to the Games: Effective immediately, entry author names and current scores will not be shown for events that are still open for new votes. This is intended to help ensure everyone submitting a score isn’t influenced by other people. I’ve seen a bit of ganging-up that I’d rather not see. Archived events - those completely closed and for which prizes have been awarded - will display full information, including user names of comment authors. The new event viewer, which is currently under development, will display comment author names. These will be visible to an entry’s author immediately, and to the public once the event is no longer open for voting. Entry authors: This means you won’t be able to see your score while it’s still open for voting, unless you use the new beta viewer (which I’ll be wrapping up this weekend).
If you’d like a quick peek at something, log into the Scripting Games Web site, and go look at the entries in Event 1. Your URL should look like this: http://scriptinggames.org/entrylist.php?eventid=11 Change it to this: http://scriptinggames.org/entrylist_.php?eventid=11 This is the new viewer I’m building. It isn’t rigged up to accept votes or comments, yet, but I’m working on that. It’s being developed for Firefox; I’ll test the other major browsers once it’s a bit more complete. This is under development, so it may be offline or unreliable. Don’t tell me about it - I’m already working on it . You can probably use this on Event 2 as well. The voting and commenting should be working. Note that you must vote before you can comment, and right now it’ll only accept one comment per person. That will probably remain the case for the current iteration of the Games based on some back-end dependencies. However, you CAN tie a comment to a particular line number or range of lines, and when viewing the comment it’ll highlight those lines. It’s pretty neat, I think. Oh, and I know the coloring on block comments is wonky. I need to dive into the color-er’s regexes and see if I can tweak that. Any regex wizards who want to volunteer to help with that, drop me a line. Right now the PowerShell syntax in the color-er is a little primitive. Actually, there are probably several regexes we could add to this to spruce up the listings. And yes, I know the comments now show the author’s user name. That’s been a big back-and-forth. I’m not a huge fan of anonymous commenting, and right now it’s just your username anyway. Hopefully nobody said anything truly offensive simply because they thought they were anonymous :). Back to work.
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. Voting is down… that happens, too, as the thrill of event 1 falls off. We had 3,966 Beginner votes and 2,775 Advanced votes in Event 1; so far we’ve gotten 1,446 Beginner and 1,131 Advanced in Event 2. Of course, we still have almost a week of voting left to go in Event 2, and in Event 1 we took a lot of votes up to the last minute. The good news is that Event 2’s votes have, so far, included a much higher percentage of comments. Event 1 Beginner has about 55% comments, while Advanced had 58%. In Event 2, Beginner is tracking to 63%, while Advanced is at 59%. Good job, guys - those comments are a big help. As you know, we’ve also put up some general guidelines to help keep everyone on the same page with what the score levels mean, so hopefully that’s helping, too. Something’s sure helping. The average score in Event 1 Beginner was 2.5585, and Advanced 2.3870. Event 2 is up a notch, at 2.6957 and 2.6631. That’s a 5% jump in Beginner scores and over 11% jump in Advanced scores. I know, people are tough on the scoring. And in some cases, I’m seeing comments that indicate the comment author had some misunderstandings. That’s okay - it’s an opportunity for us all to learn together, especially after the Games complete and we can start diving into this mess of data. I hope you’re already to start on Event 3! Our fastest entry so far is just over 51 minutes, and I might be saving some special prizes for the overall fastest entry (don’t worry - I’m going to look at it to make sure it’s decent). May the Games be Ever in Your Fav… ugh, sorry. Don’t know where that came from. Good luck!
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. Clean formatting and avoidance of using aliases in scripts is among the things he will be paying attention to.
