We are so excited for the 2020 PowerShell and DevOps Global Summit! We’re about halfway through the CFP season and are still looking for your awesome submissions. If you are hesitating, please don’t… think seriously about submitting a topic or two. To help you, we’d like to give you some ideas about what makes a submission stand out (and what doesn’t).
Something Unique… We’re looking for a new spin or twist on an old (or new) topic. If something similar has been done at a previous Summit, think about how you’re doing something different from what’s previously been presented. DevOps topics are always popular, but what new thing are you doing with your source control, your testing, or your build pipeline?
Failures… Alternatively, is there something you started out to do and at some point, figured out that you it wasn’t going to work the way it was planned? If you’ve had some good lessons learned that you think would benefit others, we’d love to hear about it.
Broad scope vs. deep scope… If you’ve done a snack “bake-off” and could talk about chips, cookies, and crackers, this session would be attended by folks who prefer chips or cookies or crackers. However, a session that is only about cookies might only be of interest to Rambling Cookie Monsters. If you’re a subject matter expert on chips, though, and can show how to use chips to build a house, that would have that uniqueness factor we’re also looking for.
Multiple submissions… Multiple submissions on different topics help us select a wide variety of topics. It’s hard to say from year to year what topics will be popular. For example, we had a lot of Git and Pester submissions last year… not so many this year. We’re looking for variety so submit as many ideas as you have.
Something that wasn’t selected last year… We may have really liked your submission last year and it may have simply been on the bubble. You’re only up against the submissions that we’ve seen for this year, so if you had a submission from last year that you feel passionate about and is still a hot topic, please submit it!
“Post OnRamp” submissions are welcome… We have a graduated class of OnRamp students from last year who we want to continue learning. Therefore, we’ll be looking for a small number of sessions at this level.
I’m a huge fan of lightning demos. From the community and PowerShell Team lightning demos we get at the summit, to PSPowerHour, to various local groups and conferences using the format.
At the 2019 PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit, we’ll have about 90 minutes for these demos - now we just need proposals from you!
So! Why might you be interested in lightning demos?
Why Lightning Demos
Lightning demos are great for the audience and speakers alike.
PowerShell Core 6 is scheduled for General Availability release tomorrow (10th January). As such Jeffrey Snover and the PowerShell Team are hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) event on the 11th January from 9am - 10am PT.
“This is going to be a historical week for PowerShell Core 6 🙂 …Join the PowerShell team and @jsnover{.twitter-atreply.pretty-link.js-nav} this Thursday for the PowerShell AMA”
Add it to your calendar here. Due to the timing I expect that the team are mostly hoping for questions related to the release of PS Core, although in the spirit of an AMA anything goes :). If you haven’t yet checked out PowerShell Core 6, you can grab the RC release today and install it side-by-side with Windows PowerShell. I have also written a blog post that explains what PowerShell Core is, why it exists and how it compares which I hope you find informative.
Automation and scripting has become a major part of IT in recent years. And PowerShell has played a giant role in the progression of that. Every year, the wonderful people at PowerShell.org put on the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit, that always produces outstanding results from amazing speakers and attendees.
As many of you in IT know, convincing your manager to attend conferences usually depends on a few key factors: Cost and budget, content, and sometimes, experience or seniority in the company. And unfortunately, that last one may be a deciding factor far too often. This year, PowerShell.org is making it a priority to help extend, not only the content and knowledge that comes with attending the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit, but also the experience that comes along with it.
At the upcoming “IT Transformation” event in Orlando this month (still time left to register!), members of the PowerShell team will be leading a full-day workshop that’s pretty much a don’t-miss (and no, it isn’t being recorded). Here’s the schedule:
Time
Speaker
Title
09:00am-10:00am
Jeffrey Snover
Observations on Modern IT Practices and Organization Culture
10:00am-10:15am
break
10:15am-12:00pm
Michael Greene
The Release Pipeline Model
12:00pm-01:00pm
lunch
01:00pm-02:45pm
Michael Greene
Instructor Led Hands-On Lab: Constructing a pipeline for PowerShell Modules using Visual Studio Team Services.
03:00pm-04:00pm
Timothy Warner
Introduction to Azure Automation DSC
04:00pm-05:00pm
Jeffrey Snover
Closing thoughts and AMA
Personally, I’m super-excited. I’ll be presenting a full-day workshop myself (the day before), along with a couple of breakout sessions and a keynote with Jeffrey Snover. Hope to see you there!
Last weekend we hosted our second PowerShell Saturday, this time the event was hosted by IPsoft in Amsterdam. During this event members of the Dutch PowerShell User Group gathered together to view a number of presentations and to engage in lively discussions on the various new developments in the PowerShell world. For more information about PowerShell Saturday, the Dutch PowerShell User Group or the slides and code used in the presentations please head over to the recap blog post here: Recap of Dutch PowerShell Saturday September 2016
Join the Mississippi PowerShell User Group virtually on Tuesday, July 12th 2016 at 8:30pm Central Time when Mike Fal will be presenting “Exploring SQLPS, the SQL Server PowerShell Module”. A big hurdle for using PowerShell and SQL Server together is the SQLPS module. Both old and new users of PowerShell don’t completely understand its capabilities. In this session, we’ll talk about the cmdlets you may not know about, tricks to save time using the provider, and even a few gotchas on how the provider works that can save you some time and energy. When we’re finished, you will have a deeper understanding of how you can use SQL Server and PowerShell together. Visit the Mississippi PowerShell User Group website to learn more about Mike and to find out more details about this month’s meeting. The Mississippi PowerShell User Group Meetings are held online (via Skype for Business) on the second Tuesday of each month at 8:30pm Central Time and are free to attend. The system requirements to attend these online meetings can be found on the MSPSUG website under the “Attendee Info” section. Register via EventBrite to receive the URL for this meeting. Note: It is not necessary to live in Mississippi or join our user group to attend our meetings or present a session for our user group. µ
Join the Mississippi PowerShell User Group virtually on Tuesday, June 14th 2016 at 8:30pm Central Time when Microsoft MVP Robert Cain will be presenting “Pester the Tester: PowerShell Bugs Beware!”. So you’ve been developing PowerShell for a while, or perhaps you’re taking over maintenance of an existing set of scripts. It would be great to get extra confidence in your scripts through testing, but how? You’re in luck, there’s a new module in town, Pester! Pester is a friendly testing framework designed for testing your PowerShell scripts and modules. In this session you’ll be introduced to Pester. You’ll see how to use Pester to uncover bugs, as well as using it for test driven development. Make your own PowerShell more robust through the use of Pester. Kill those PowerShell bugs, dead! Visit the Mississippi PowerShell User Group website to learn more about Robert and to find out more details about this month’s meeting. The Mississippi PowerShell User Group Meetings are held online (via Skype for Business) on the second Tuesday of each month at 8:30pm Central Time and are free to attend. The system requirements to attend these online meetings can be found on the MSPSUG website under the “Attendee Info” section. Register via EventBrite to receive the URL for this meeting. Note: It is not necessary to live in Mississippi or join our user group to attend our meetings or present a session for our user group. µ
Ever wonder just what the heck the Microsoft PowerShell team was thinking? Come find out! Keith Bankston is the senior program manager for PowerShell. Mark Gray is the senior program manager for DSC. Michael Greene is the program manager responsible for understanding customer feedback and getting it into PowerShell. Join us for a panel discussion where they will answer all of our questions about PowerShell and we in turn will answer their questions about how we use PowerShell and how we would like to use it in the future. Target North Campus 7300 Oak Grove Parkway Brooklyn Park, MN This is a secure facility. RSVP with full name is required. If you do not use your full name on meetup, please email us your full name. Park in the guest lot to the west of the complex. Check in with security with photo ID. You will be escorted to the meeting room. Food and networking begin at 4:30. The main meeting will run from 5 to 7.
Thanks to all those who participated in the PowerShell Editor Services Hack Week last week! Much progress was made on fixing bugs and adding new features to both PowerShell Editor Services and the PowerShell extension for Visual Studio Code. Here’s a quick summary of the contributions that were made during the week: Variable Display Improvements in the Debugger Keith Hill made many great improvements to how we display variable contents in the Visual Studio Code debugger. First of all, he added support for variable scopes other than just “Local” as we had before. You can now inspect variables from both the Global and Script scopes. You will also see a special “Auto” section which filters the set of variables down to those that were defined in the current scope. This is really helpful for quickly checking the state of the variables in your functions! He also added greatly improved the variable value display for collections such as arrays and dictionaries and also objects which implement the ToString() method in .NET. You will now see much greater detail for these variables in the debugger: New Expand Aliases Command Doug Finke contributed a new “Expand Aliases” command which searches your script file or selection for the use of cmdlet aliases. For any alias it finds, it replaces the text with the full command name. This is helpful for developers who want to quickly write out scripts using aliases but resolve them to their command names before committing to source control. Here’s a GIF of the feature in action (click to play!): Sublime Text Editor Integration Work on the integration of PowerShell Editor Services in Sublime Text has progressed quite well this week. The basic protocol implementation is now working, enabling language features to be integrated over time. I’ve also implemented basic file management support so that opened files are sent to Editor Services for syntax checking and semantic analysis. From this point it’s just a matter of integrating the language features of PowerShell Editor Services into Sublime’s UI using its plugin API. Check out the current code in the editor-services branch of my fork of the PowerShell Sublime Text package. Once this effort is stable enough for an initial release, I’ll be submitting a PR back to the original PowerShell Sublime Text package repo and future work will continue there. Atom Editor Integration Some work was started on an integration with the Atom editor but it was quickly determine that Atom’s APIs for language features were to sparse to make quick progress. However, with the experience gained from the Sublime Text integration, future work on the Atom integration should be much easier. Expect to see more effort in this area in the first half of 2016. Miscellaneous Improvements
