Don Jones

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Don Jones

372 articles published

1 min read

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2016 Registration Status

A quick status update on Summit: We’re currently past our 50% registration point. Right now, only 4-day registrations are available. Register at https://eventloom.com/event/home/PSNA16. In just a few days, on February 1st, we’ll open all remaining seats for both 3- and 4-day registrations (same registration URL). Registration ends during the first week of March. At that time, we’ll review the situation, and may be able to open additional seats. However, the price will go up a bit.

3 min read

2016-January Scripting Games Puzzle

Our January 2016 puzzle comes from MVP Adam Bertram. We’re actively interested in receiving Scripting Games puzzles from members of the community - submit yours, along with an official solution, to us at admin@ via email!

3 min read

PowerShell.org's Nonprofit Status

We learned today that The DevOps Collective, Inc., (the company that officially owns and runs PowerShell.org, the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit, etc.) was accepted by the US Treasury as a 501(c)(3) public charity. That means that the company is quite literally owned by the American public now, and run by its Board of Directors. No human or business entity owns the company and its assets, which is exactly our intent.

2 min read

My Favorite DSC Feature Suggestions on UserVoice (upvote!)

Hopefully, you’re aware that Microsoft is moving to UserVoice for accepting feature requests and bugs. DSC in particular has 30-odd suggestions at present, and I thought I’d run through some of my fav’s. Log in and up-vote the ones you like, or add comments to expand the discussion! Add Maintenance Windows Awareness to DSC/LCM. This is one of mine, but it came from several customer suggestions. Change the Pull Server database to SQL Server.

3 min read

Microsoft's Brave New World Needs Version Numbers

In Microsoft’s brave new world of agile, more-frequent software releases, including numerous pre-release cycles… Microsoft needs to rethink the way it communicates versioning. Windows Management Framework (WMF) v5 has, for me, been pretty much the perfect example of what not to do, and the perfect example of Microsoft still shoehorning itself into old nomenclature that no longer fills the bill. I know a bunch of folks on the PowerShell team are probably still trying to figure out what works, too, so this isn’t meant to be a hammer-on-’em post, but WMF5’s lifecycle was, from a versioning perspective, pretty hellish.

3 min read

PowerShell News Roundup (There's Been a Lot of it)

There’ve been so many under-the-radar announcements and news bits about PowerShell, that I thought it’d be worth a quick start-of-the-week, pre-holiday roundup. First off, the big news is that **Windows Management Framework v5 has been released to manufacturing (RTM). **Not that there’s any real “manufacturing” anymore, but this means we’ve hit the milestone where it’s “done.” Now, if Microsoft is smart, whatever WMF ships with Win2016 will be “5.1” or something, so we can all keep track of what’s what.

4 min read

A Real-World DevOps Implementation – and Food for Thought

Want to see what a real-world, functional, production-grade DevOps environment looks like? Look no further than Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Beanstalk (EBS). EBS is a neat combination of their EC2 IaaS product, S3 storage, and some DevOps magic. From a working perspective, it goes something like this: Developer checks code into Git. A portion of this code is actually a set of EBS directives, outlining changes that need to be made to the base operating environment.

3 min read

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2016 Info

Here’s everything that’s fit to print regarding Summit 2016, running April 3-4-5-6 in Bellevue, WA! You can also download: Brochure-PowerShell and DevOps Summit 2016 to share with your boss and team. Registration Registration for Summit will open December 1, 2015, and run through March 1, 2016. Visit the registration website for more details. Registration will be limited to about 200 attendees. Initially, we will only offer registration for a 4-day event, which includes full-day pre-conference sessions on April 3rd, 2016.