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What’s the average tech conference cost these days? $1500? $2000? And that’s just to get in, to say nothing of hotel, air, food, and whatnot. The PowerShell Summit North America 2013 has an idea. Lets do a community-owned event, with a goal of breaking even and supporting an annual event, but not worry about a profit. Lets say you live in the US. A ticket to Seattle in April will run you $500-700 after taxes.
When Kirk Munro and I set this site up, and started redirecting traffic from the old PowerShellCommunity.org, one of our main goals was to make this a truly community-owned resource. We wanted it hosted independently (my company, Concentrated Tech, is being paid to host the site, so we get pretty good service and total control). We didn’t want to be beholden to anyone’s commercial interests or whims (companies do get distracted by their real jobs from time to time, after all).
That’s right, for just $400 you can guarantee yourself a seat at the PowerShell Summit North America 2013, to be held at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, WA. Just 10 tickets will be made available at this low-low-low price, which is $150 off the normal registration rate. Why so low? Why are they called “I’m Feeling Lucky” tickets? Because while we’re committed to an April 2013 date, we haven’t actually locked in dates with Microsoft, yet.
Microsoft recently posted the online help for PowerShell v3 Workflow (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj134242), and I wanted to take an opportunity to explore some of what the help says - and perhaps offer an outsider’s perspective. What is Workflow? Workflow is a set of technologies included with PowerShell v3, and is available on any computer running v3 (which can include Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2012).
This is a free e-book that covers PowerShell Remoting. There’s a brief overview and tutorial of actually using Remoting, but that part isn’t in-depth. What this e-book provides, that you won’t find elsewhere, is step-by-step, screenshot-based instructions for configuring Remoting for any imaginable scenario. You’ll also find troubleshooting tutorials and examples, and even information on how to explain Remoting to your corporate IT security team. It’s all the stuff that isn’t documented in PowerShell’s own help - and it’s completely free. You don’t even need to register to download the file!
We’re looking for a few good PowerShell contributors! You don’t need to be a PowerShell expert in order to make a valuable contribution to this community - there are a number of ways in which you can help.
Welcome to the new community!
This site represents an evolution of the old PowerShellCommunity.org (also accessible at PoshComm.org). We’ve moved the site off of the old DotNetNuke software, and are now using a combination of WordPress (for community-hosted blogs) and Vanilla 2 (for the forums and for blog comments).
Why the new site? A couple of reasons. For one, we desperately wanted to get out of the DotNetNuke software, which has proven somewhat difficult to work with since none of us are experts with it. We also needed to get the site out of it’s home in a Quest datacenter. Quest was awesome for providing that hosting, but they’re moving on to bigger and better things, and we wanted to get a bit more control over the site. We also wanted to trim the site down a bit, to focus mainly on providing a blogging platform and aggregation point, and the all-important Q&A forums that folks rely on.
Jeff and I are going to be hosting a LiveMeeting-based “hangout.” We’ll start with a discussion on PowerShell v3 Workflows just to get things moving, but we’re relying on you to bring your questions! We’ll have PowerShell v3 available for demos… hope you can attend! Here’s the LiveMeeting details. Note that **only VoIP audio will be provided - there will be no dial-up number. ** When: Thursday, Aug 2, 2012 10:00 AM (PDT)
I’ve been getting a few questions like this in my inbox: I love "PowerShell in a Month of Lunches" and I'm wondering how much of the 3.0 book that is coming out soon will overlap with the one I have now? In other words, how much of the new book is catching us up to speed on what's new in 3.0? First of all - thanks for the love! Now, here’s the lowdown:
I’m often asked by folks if there’s a “better way” to do something in a script. Often times, they’re looking for a better procedural approach - following best practices like object-based output, for example. But sometimes, they’re looking for better performance from a script or command. Well, the good news is that PowerShell itself can help with that. Let’s consider two short scripts that produce almost identical output. Here’s the first: