I hope you’re getting excited for the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2021! I can’t wait to get back to seeing fantastic demos, exploring new topics and learning from others. I have written in the past about how the Summit 2021 event will be a little different because of it being a virtual event. But even though we won’t be together in person, there is one thing about Summit you expect over the years: AWESOME DEMOS!
The third edition of the PowerShell Conference Book is now available and on sale at the discounted price of $19.99. But you need to hurry because the discounted price is only available until Friday evening!
What is the PowerShell Conference Book?
The book is designed to be a representation of what it’s like when you attend a conference. Traditional books have a singular topic, such as “Windows Server 2019” or “Mastering Ansible”. But this book is not geared towards a single topic. Instead, much like a conference, it’s a collection of ideas all focused around a general theme. All the chapters are related in some way to PowerShell and DevOps. The book contains over 20 different chapters, each written by a different author. The authors of the book are community members and subject matter experts who have graciously donated their time and knowledge for a good cause. Each chapter is similar in length and focus to what it would be like if you attended a conference and listened to the author present their topic to a live audience, except now it’s in written form. Imagine if you were able to capture those sessions and lock them into a format that you could refer to over and over again. It’s a conference in a book format!
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.
We’re looking for someone who can publish a regular “What You Missed This Week” blog post on PowerShell.org each Friday (excepting the odd week off for vacations, of course). This is meant just as a roundup of interesting posts from around the web; we know tons of people are blogging in their own spaces, and we’d like to call attention to some of the more noteworthy ones. This isn’t any more complex than a brief blurb for each:
Microsoft recently announced the General Availability (that is, a non-beta release) of PowerShell Core 6.0. A companion document detailing breaking changes, along with some of the language in the announcement, has led to more than a few inquiries in my mailbox. Most take the tone of, “have I been wasting my time learning PowerShell?!?!?” because, at first glance, PowerShell Core looks deeply less functional than its predecessor. Let me tell you what I think.
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.
A couple of weeks ago, DevOps Collective (PowerShell.org’s parent non-profit organization) announced the availability of the ‘GetGoing’ IT Ops Education Program and Scholarship. For those of you who may not have yet heard, DevOps Collective and Pluralsight have partnered together to create a modern ’turnkey’ curriculum that brings together mapped courses, recommended hands-on experiences, and live mentoring to prepare people for the real-world of IT Operations. With this initiative, they’ve offered up to full-ride scholarships for 2016. Applications for the scholarship have opened, and applications will be taken in until May 15th. Now that the way has been paved, it’s our turn as members of the community to get the word out; and doing so might be easier than you think! Contact Your Local School Districts I recently reached out to my hometown public school district, and was immediately met with enthusiasm from the local superintendent and their Science, Guidance, and Counseling departments. It only takes a quick email with some bullet points on the program to get the conversation initiated. I’ve included the text of my initial correspondence for you to use as a guide to help you on your way. Contacting your school district is
easy
. A quick search online for your district can get your to their website with contact info, often including the email addresses for the district superintendent and other office officials that can help! Send them a copy of the brochure to help them get informed of the initiative. Use Your Social Media Skills Get the conversation going on social media! Talk to your followers; speak out to local educational organizations; and make them aware of this awesome new program! Inform Your User Groups Get your user groups in on the action. Enlist the greater community to get the word out faster! Together we can canvas an even larger area and get more people interested! Get Involved Offer to become a mentor. We all know that the best way to learn is from real world experiences. We, as a community, have this vast repository of practical knowledge that no book can effectively provide. We, as a collective resource, can help to bring a new generation of administrators, engineers, and architects into this world already prepared to take on DevOps, Agile IT, and more! If you need a hand getting started, feel free to contact me at webmaster at powershell.org. Now let’s #GetGoing ourselves, and make this happen! Here’s my initial contact email that you can use to fit your own story: Greetings [Contact Name],
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. We had several “technology preview” releases, which were simply named after their month of release. April 2015. November. Whatever. It was really difficult from within the product - e.g., via $PSVersionTable - to tell which one you were running, which made helping people difficult. None of these were supported in production until the “WMF5 Production Preview” released in late 2015, and in December we got “RTM” code. RTM means “Released to Manufacturing,” which is kind of absurd as a milestone, because there’s literally zero actual manufacturing going on. It’s just a word Microsoft is used to using. Windows 10 shipped with a production-supported version of WMF5, but it still wasn’t “final,” meaning RTM WMF is better than what shipped with the RTM OS. God willing, what ships in Windows Server 2016 will be v5.1 or something, because if we get yet another 5.0 release folks are going to start throwing up their hands and quitting. Now that Microsoft’s all lovey-huggy with open source and Linux and stuff, can we just copy what those guys do? Every time you release code, increment the version number. It’s that simple. There’s no “production preview,” there’s just “5.3.” And you maintain a list of what’s supported in production. If 5.3 isn’t a production milestone, fine - say so. But it’s still a real version, because it was released unto the world. The next release is 5.4. Then 5.5. And maybe 5.6 is supported in production, but once 5.7 is out, 5.6 remains supported for only 90 days. Or whatever. Just have a list of what’s supported, and increment the version number every time you release it. 5.8 might only last a week before someone finds some heinous bug and releases 5.9 - that’s fine. After that comes 5.10, and then 5.11, and so on. 6.0 is the first release of a major new evolution in the product, and it’s probably a “preview” release. 6.1 will be a bit better, with fewer bugs and more features nailed down, but it won’t be until maybe 6.5 that we get a “supported in production” release. All of this is a lot easier to keep track of than vague “version” numbers like “April 2016 Production Preview.” And while we’re at it, let’s have a Get-PSVersionInfo cmdlet. It can wrap around the existing $PSVersionTable variable, of course, but it can also ping a web service on Microsoft.com to tell you what the latest version is, what the latest supported version is, and whether or not your current version is supported in production. OMG, that would be _wonderful. _
PowerShell.org was never meant to be a small group of people doing good - it was meant to be a place where all of us can do good for each other. And that’s why **everyone is invited to blog here. ** Yup, even you. If you’d like blogging permissions added to your account, just e-mail webmaster@ with your site username, and we’ll make it so. Now, I do realize that a lot of folks would much rather blog in their own space, and that’s totally, 100% cool. But, if you’d like to blog here, we only have a few rules.
A couple of weeks ago, DevOps Collective (PowerShell.org’s parent non-profit organization)