We’re pleased to announce the winners for Event 5 of The Scripting Games 2013! Remember that Event 6 is now open for community voting, and that Event 6 opens up near the end of this week. That’ll be your last chance to contribute, and shortly after TechEd we’ll announce the overall winners. Good luck! Winners: You can log into The Scripting Games Web site and go to your Profile page to see your prize. You will be given a prize redemption code and either a URL where you can redeem it, or an e-mail address of the prize provider (they will need the redemption code). All prizes must be claimed by the end of July 2013. I will list winners by username; if you used your e-mail address as your username, then a portion of that will be truncated for your privacy. Anyone can log in and check their Profile page to see if they’ve won a prize.
We’ve still got, oh, about 48 hours or so for Event 6 submissions, and then of course voting and judging. But I wanted to take a second and let you know what this year’s Games looked like: We’ve logged over 1,100 entries. Almost 13,000 votes. More than 6,700 comments. That’s a lot - and it’ll all be archived once the final votes are tallied and prizes awarded. There will be ZIP files of entries for each track and event, and I encourage you to download them over the Summer - we won’t necessarily archive them permanently. We’ve seen an enormous range of techniques and approaches, and generated hundreds of learning notes across more than a dozen active expert commentators. We’ve awarded - with some yet to be handed out - thousands of dollars worth of prizes. This is also a good time to start collecting general feedback on the Games, so feel free to drop into our official post-mortem thread and offer your feedback. Read the introductory post in that thread before you post, please. I’m asking for a specific feedback format at this time, although you’re always welcome to open your own thread if you have something specific or off-format you want to offer. I ask only that you keep things constructive and professional. Thanks to everyone who participated in the Games. We’re formulating our next event, so stay tuned.
I loved this week"™s challenge as it had the right wiggle room to bring out the best in our participants. Of course, this is also the point in the games when we start to get everyone"™s “A” game. At this point even our new competitors are all warmed up and in the zone, and let me tell you the entries this week show it!   I want to start with the beginners as I actually ran almost every entry this week. Honestly everyone fell into one of three buckets Select-string, Import-CSV or ,Foreach. Let me explain there where three primary means to solve this problem. Use Select-String and some basic text parsing to get the ip addresses, and then using Select-Object to filter. Converting the logs to objects with Import-CSV and using Where-Object to filter. Or using Foreach and a combination of if and where. They are all three correct, so how does one judge one from another? As this is a competition I used speed as the determining gauge.  For a long time I was convinced that the following was about perfect. Quick simple and accurate.
We’re pleased to announce the winners for Event 4 of The Scripting Games 2013! Remember that Event 5 is now open for community voting, and that Event 6 opens up near the end of this week. That’ll be your last chance to contribute, and shortly after TechEd we’ll announce the overall winners. Good luck! Winners: You can log into The Scripting Games Web site and go to your Profile page to see your prize. You will be given a prize redemption code and either a URL where you can redeem it, or an e-mail address of the prize provider (they will need the redemption code). All prizes must be claimed by the end of July 2013. I will list winners by username; if you used your e-mail address as your username, then a portion of that will be truncated for your privacy. Anyone can log in and check their Profile page to see if they’ve won a prize.
Again if you"™re participating in the games this year you"™ve already won! If you"™re not and you"™re reading this post what are you doing! I"™ve watched authors step there game up over the past month, and I can tell you from personal experience the games will make you better at your real job. It"™s like sharpening an axe, an axe made of super juice that can automate the world 🙂 **Well that’s clever! ** I came across this script this morning.
We’re pleased to announce the winners for Event 3 of The Scripting Games 2013! Winners: You can log into The Scripting Games Web site and go to your Profile page to see your prize. You will be given a prize redemption code and either a URL where you can redeem it, or an e-mail address of the prize provider (they will need the redemption code). All prizes must be claimed by the end of July 2013. I will list winners by username; if you used your e-mail address as your username, then a portion of that will be truncated for your privacy. Anyone can log in and check their Profile page to see if they’ve won a prize. Note: Our hosting company is doing some maintenance on their admin site, so it may be a day or two before redemption codes appear in your Scripting Games profile. Appreciate your patience. And seriously, you’re killing me with the usernames. Heh.
It’s been a crazy-busy week for me, so I’m just getting caught up here. I’m off observing the beta-teach of the new 10961A PowerShell 3 class in Phoenix next week, but I’ll be keeping an eye on the Games. So let’s run some numbers. The Games have 2092 users at present, along with 10960 scores and 5412 comments. There are 849 total entries. Regarding Event 3, we have 109 Advanced entries and 122 Beginner entries. The average beginner score is 2.8416, and the advanced score is 2.8512. Darn close. Site traffic is up to 25,000 visits from 18,200 unique visitors, for a total of 56,000 page views and a poo-load of bandwidth. I should have Event 3 winners posted on Tuesday sometime.
I’ve been making some more programming changes to the Scripting Games, based on folks’ feedback. If you run into problems, please notify me via the Feedback Forums link at the bottom of every page on the site. Use the email address provided. Don’t post a comment here, because I might not see it quickly.
Multiple comments per reviewer - you can now leave multiple comments on an entry. Combined with the ability to mark your comment as pertaining to a line or range of lines, this should allow for more granular commenting.
Comment without voting - you are now free to offer comments without offering a score.
Delete comments - you can now delete the comments you have written.
I’m still plugging away at some IE9/10-related errors, which are causing the code reviewer/voter/commenter to not display on some entries. In the meantime, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox seem to be working fine.
Bartosz (Bartek) Bielawski is a busy IT Administrator with an international company, PAREXEL. He loves PowerShell and automation. That love earned him the honor of Microsoft MVP. He shares his knowledge mainly on his blogs: in English (http://becomelotr.wordpress.com) and Polish (http://powershellpl.net) and through articles published in the Polish IT Professional (http://it-professional.pl) magazine. He is co-author of PowerShell Deep Dives book (http://www.manning.com/hicks/). He loves good code that takes advantage of PowerShell pipeline and advanced functions grouped in modules.
We’re pleased to announce the winners for Event 2 of The Scripting Games 2013! Winners: You can log into The Scripting Games Web site and go to your Profile page to see your prize. You will be given a prize redemption code and either a URL where you can redeem it, or an e-mail address of the prize provider (they will need the redemption code). All prizes must be claimed by the end of July 2013. I will list winners by username; if you used your e-mail address as your username, then a portion of that will be truncated for your privacy. Anyone can log in and check their Profile page to see if they’ve won a prize.
