Hello fellow PowerShell enthusiasts. I have been missing for a few months with a new child that has occupied most of my extra time! I look forward to get back in the blogging gear soon. I just wanted to send out a note that we are hosting our first kick off meeting for the Boston PowerShell User Group at the Microsoft MTC in Kendall Square Cambridge, MA. Here are the two topics that will be delivered via Matt Nelson and Will Schroeder. Offensive Active Directory With PowerShell Active Directory has been covered from a system administration aspect for as long as it has existed. However, much less information exists on how adversaries abuse and backdoor AD, leaving many defenders blind to the attacks being executed in their own environment. We’ll cover Active Directory from an offensive perspective, illustrating ways that attackers move through Windows networks with ease. PowerView (the PowerShell domain enumeration tool) will be highlighted, including how to use it for local administrator enumeration, domain trust hopping, user hunting, ACL auditing, and more. Building an Empire With PowerShell Over the past few years, attackers have started to realize that the same aspects of PowerShell that make it an excellent Windows automation solution also make it an ideal attack platform. The Empire project aims to bring together various offensive projects into a fully-functional malware agent (written purely in PowerShell) that can be used offensively by red teams and used to train blue teams to defend against these types of attacks. Hope anyone local can make it. Sign up is live over at Meetup.com: http://www.meetup.com/Boston-PowerShell-User-Group/events/230856302/
OK, we finally have a huge batch of PowerShell.org and DevOpsCollective.org laptop stickers! These are great, heavy-duty, removable stickers for laptop and every day use. Here’s how you can get yours - follow these instructions carefully!
United States
First, this offer is only valid until July 1st, 2016. After that, you’ll have to attend PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit, our Ignite “PowerShell Community Happy Hour” event, or someplace else where we’re in-person to get a sticker. Sorry for the deadline - I’m just not in the full-time sticker distribution business. To get your sticker, send a business-sized Self-Addressed, Stamped Envelope to Don Jones, 7582 Las Vegas Blvd S, Suite 503, Las Vegas NV 89123. The return envelope should include your address in both the “main” and “return address” positions.
Its a new year with new goals and I hope to provide even more assistance and value to the PowerShell community in 2016. I have created a new Boston based PowerShell user group and will be working hard on creating sessions as frequently and regularly as possible. If you are in the greater Boston or New England area please join the user group. If we have any Microsoft employees or PowerShell MVPs visiting the Boston area in the future, we would love to have you deliver a session. I have arranged booking of a room in the Microsoft Technology Center located at Kendall Square, 255 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142 when required. I will also look into offering the meetings over Skype for Business if possible. Check out and join the Boston PowerShell User Group here: http://www.meetup.com/Boston-PowerShell-User-Group
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. Further, no human or business entity can profit from the company, which is also our exact intent. Regardless of who’s running it, it’s now big-time illegal for any Director (for example) to just partake of the organization’s money. Previously, it was merely unethical, but completely legal, as the company was technically for-profit. So we’re right where we want to be. Donations to the corporation are now tax-deductible, charitable contributions. However, a donation is when you get nothing of value in return; unfortunately, Summit registration fees - since Summit itself is of considerable material value - are not charitable contributions. Your registration is likely still deductible as a business expense (namely, education, along with your travel expenses), something you or your organization’s accountants should determine. Sponsorships - given that sponsors don’t receive anything of material value from us - are considered deductible contributions in most cases. I’m very proud to have brought the organization to this point, and I want to point out that it’s due in part to Microsoft’s own recent activities, such as bringing Core CLR, the WS-MAN stack, DSC client, and other bits to non-Windows operating systems, as well as their progress in open sourcing so many critical pieces. Those activities - and our expanding focus on DevOps in general - have taken us away from being an organization that supports a commercial product (MS Windows) to a much broader organization that was qualified for this beneficial status. I also want to offer a big shout-out to my fellow Directors, and especially Jason Helmick, who put in a lot of work with our own accountants to get this all in order for the IRS. For the organization itself, it means our main revenue activity - Summit - is now nontaxable for us. That means we get to keep all of our money to spend on organizational operating expenses, instead of losing some of it to taxes. That gives us a 15-25% boost in being able to operate our TeamCity public build server, this very website, our TechSession webinars, and other activities. This new status also, I believe, places us firmly on a path toward long-term existence. PowerShell.org is now, in a very binding legal way, something _we all own, _and something it’s on all of us to continue growing and supporting. Thank you for that support, and Happy New Year!
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. Fingers crossed on that. Next, and you may have missed this, Microsoft is moving away from Connect and over to UserVoice for many products, and PowerShell is now amongst them. Spread the word on this, because feedback is super-important, the team _actually does listen, _and UserVoice is now where it’ll happen. In the continuing move to open source, the PowerShell team **released a bunch of their tests on GitHub. **These are some of the tests they use to test PowerShell itself, and the ability for everyone to now contribute to those means the team can produce more error free code for us. This is a big deal, and proves this isn’t your grandfather’s Microsoft anymore. The **DSC Documentation has also been open sourced, **meaning we can all finally contribute to that. Yeah, we all know Microsoft should be producing their own docs - and they are - but this lets us correct errors, add examples and expansions, and fill in the gaps Microsoft may have to leave. They’re not a bundle of infinite resources, after all, and this finally lets us help each other in a more effective way. The PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2016 is about 1/3 sold-out. Currently, only 4-day registration is available. In February, we’ll begin offering any remaining seats for 3-day attendance as well as 4-day. We don’t recommend waiting much longer, because when we hit most people’s new fiscal year next month, it’ll be downhill to “sold out” again. Remember that registration cuts off at the beginning of March 2016, too. Finally, the Scripting Games puzzles continue to be posted at the start of each month (usually the first Saturday). We’re actively looking for a moderator to take over the process of collecting puzzle submissions from the community, coordinating puzzle and solution posting, and reviewing community submissions for noteworthy ones to call out. If you’re interested, drop an e-mail to admin here at PowerShell.org. We already have content for January and February 2016, and are also looking for puzzle submissions. Drop an e-mail if you’d like to contribute a puzzle and a solution. Happy Holidays from everyone here at PowerShell.org, and we wish you all the best in the coming new year!
Do you wish your favorite editor had better PowerShell editing support? Do you have a great idea for a new feature for the PowerShell extension in Visual Studio Code? We’re dedicating next week, December 6th through 13th (Sunday through next Sunday), to hacking together on new features to enable better PowerShell support in any editor! Here’s the plan: On Sunday, December 6th at 11AM-12PM PST (7-8PM GMT) I’ll host a Crowdcast event to give an overview of PowerShell Editor Services, the PowerShell extension for VS Code, and other general ideas for contributions that people can make. Participants can join to ask questions and discuss potential ideas so that we can get the ball rolling. Once hacking has started, we’ll hang out together in the #editors channel of the PowerShell Slack Community so that everyone can get help on their contributions. We’ll be using these discussions to help flesh out documentation about these projects using the GitHub Wiki. Every question asked will be helpful so don’t be shy! On the week following our hacktivities, I’ll release new builds of PowerShell Editor Services and the Visual Studio Code extension containing our collective efforts. I’ll also post a follow-up report here on PowerShell.org with details about all the contributions that were made in this time.
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. On February 1st, 2016, we will open any remaining space for 3-day registration.
The Call for Topics for the 2016 Summit is now closed. We’ve had an amazing number of top quality submissions. We’d like to thank everyone who took the time to submit a proposal for a session at the Summit. We’ll be working through the submissions over the next few days as we put the agenda together for what looks to be a superb Summit.
Want to attend the newly expanded, 4-day PowerShell and DevOps Summit coming to Bellevue, WA in April 2016? Well you can - if you make your own community contribution!
Our TechLetter newsletter is looking for articles. And, November is of course NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. But we aren’t looking for a novel - just newsletter articles! So we’ll call it National PowerShell and DevOps Article Writing Month (NaPoshDoArWriMo). Er. Or something.
