PowerShell Summit: Best Conference Deal Ever!

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. Maybe less if you can get on a discount carrier like Southwest - they fly to SEA. Hotel will run you under $450 for three nights. Say you decide to splurge on a car for four days, probably for under $200 (including all the ridiculous taxes on rental cars). Toss in another $250 for food? That takes you to under $1600. PowerShell Summit only costs $550 - less if you register during one of the Early Bird tiers; as low us $450, in fact. That’s $2100-2200 total, or just a bit over what some conferences charge for their registration fee alone!
What about quality? Well, you’ll get the same food Microsoft employees get. So that can’t be all bad. You’ll attend sessions delivered by Microsoft product team members, along with independent experts. You’ll interact directly with PowerShell team managers, too, in a small-event format that lets you provide product feedback directly to them. Heck, with under 100 fellow attendees, you’ll get plenty of face time with everyone.
It’s going to be a great event, and it will definitely be affordable. It’s being run by members of the community, not a conference company. This will hopefully become OUR event, an annual gathering of PowerShell enthusiasts, experts, and team members. A chance to network, to learn, to share, and to grow.
I hope you’ll be able to join us!

Own a Piece of the Community: Buy Shares in PowerShell.org, Inc.!

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).
When we started talking to Microsoft about holding a PowerShell Summit, we wanted that to be community-owned too, and not tied to a commercial interest - in part so that we could keep the price low, but also so that Microsoft would be able to support us without getting into any possible conflicts of interest with any of its ISV partners.
Today, our intention becomes legally realized. PowerShell.org., Inc., a Nevada corporation, is born - and we’re offering ownership shares to help raise capital. This capital will be used to pay for necessities like bookkeeping, and also to help bootstrap the Summit event. Shareholders are _legal owners of the corporation, _and will vote for its Board of Directors - who in turn appoint the Officers that make things happen. Our first Board will consist of myself, Kirk, Jeffery Hicks, Richard Siddaway, and Jason Helmick.
**Want to become a community owner? **You’ll want to start with our “Shareholder Brochure,” which is available in the new “PowerShell.org, Inc.” forum on this site. That forum will also get you our Bylaws and Articles of Incorporation; the Brochure will outline the purpose of the corporation, and explain what it means to be a shareholder. The forum also contains the Share Purchase Order form, which you can use to purchase shares, and contains documents that outline our initial Board of Directors and Officer lineup and other important details.

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. So to purchase these, you’ve got to be feeling flexible… or lucky!
But it’s not a marriage. The tickets are completely refundable, up to 30 days prior to the event. So if we manage to lock in the three dates you can’t attend, we’ll give you your money back. You can also transfer the ticket to someone else, at any time (although they’ll be paying you directly for the ticket, and we won’t get involved in that transaction).
Once these sell out, or we lock in our dates, we’ll commence the Early Bird period, with a rate of $475 and just 30 tickets available. That rate will be good through the end of December, unless we sell out. Full rate of $550 kicks in after that, when we’ll sell the remaining tickets to fill our roughly 100-person venue.
Thinking about presenting? Start submitting topics in the Forums! You can get all the other juicy details on the Summit’s dedicated site, and catch the Summit’s Twitter feed for ongoing announcements.

PowerShell Workflow: When Should You Use It?

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). A workflow is a special kind of PowerShell script that looks a lot like a function. When run, however, PowerShell translates the workflow to Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) code, and hands it off to WWF to execute. That means the contents of a workflow are a bit different than the contents of a script.

eBook: Secrets of PowerShell Remoting

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!

Want to Contribute?

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.

The New PowerShell Community

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.

Join Jeff and I for a live PowerShell video chat cast!

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)

Comparing "Lunches:" v2 to v3

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:

Measure PowerShell Performance

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: