It’s been a while since I had an actual posting and at least a few weeks since I attended the PowerShell Deep Dive in Las Vegas, NV and took part in the 2011 Scripting Games. I’ve been meaning to write a blog regarding both of these earlier, but as life has it, sometimes you just don’t have the time to get it all done. So instead of two posts, I am condensing this down into one post before I get too caught up in other projects and completely forget about this.

PowerShell Deep Dive

The Deep Dive was by far the best thing I have went to in a long time. There were somewhere around 60 or so people consisting of MVPs, the product team and member of the community.  I arrived there on Saturday afternoon as I was signed up for Don Jones’s pre-conference workshop, which was an excellent 4 hours spent talking about PowerShell. That guy knows his stuff and I would recommend that if you have to opportunity to attend one of his sessions, then do it! He covered a wide range of topics and took the time to answer any question that was tossed his way. But back to Saturday, I spent the evening hanging out with Kirk Munro, Ed Wilson (The Microsoft Scripting Guy), his awesome wife, Teresa, Richard Siddaway, Jonathan Walz, Micheal Moore, Jason Archer and Marc Carter talked about whatever to include PowerShell. Just a great group of people to be around and converse with for the evening.

Monday and Tuesday was just what you would expect from a Deep Dive. Wall to wall PowerShell sessions talking about everything from Constrained Remote Endpoints to Domain Specific Vocabulary to Working with legacy applications. I would say that if you didn’t learn a single thing from any of these sessions, odds are you weren’t there then. I can speak for myself that I learned some great tips and tricks while there. One of which was via Jeff Hicks sessions on Custom Formatting and Types. I plan on using this for either my next version of PoshWSUS or the following version. Both Bruce Payette and Lee Holmes put together some great sessions and it is always great to hear what they have to say regarding anything PowerShell related.

All in all, it was a great time that I won’t soon forget. I met a ton of great people and got to hear about what they use PowerShell for in their environment and also just random things that they do in their spare time. There are just too many people here to mention that I met during my time, so I apologize to those that I left out. Here’s to seeing everyone again at the Deep Dive next year!

Scripting Games 2011

As you all know, the Scripting Games finished up a couple weeks ago as well and the winners were announced. Congrats to Klaus Schulte and Bartek Bielawski on their 1st place finish the the Beginner and Advanced division.

The games were set up pretty much the same as last year as far as the events go. The main exception is that VBScript was no longer listed as a potential scripting language to use. This is a very OK exclusion in my opinion. With PowerShell being touted as the new automation tool for Microsoft and that VBscript is now in a maintenance cycle, everyone needs to step up and learn this amazing language and make their lives easier at work.

As for myself, I took 5th in the Advanced division. Not quite the 2nd place I had last year,  but I am completely Ok with that. The competition was excellent and the events ranged from fairly easy to the bust my head through a wall tough. My personal favorite this year was Advanced Event 8, which dealt with building a GUI for finding images and allowing you to resize and strip all of the metadata from them with the push of a button. Needless to say this did not get done in a day and since only about 30 people submitted scripts for that one, it was the toughest event of the competition to complete.

If you want to check out all of the scripts that were submitted, check out this link to the Poshcode site. Here you can see what everyone did, the grades they received as well as any comments from the judges. Just a great way to not only learn more about PowerShell but also to maybe find a better way of doing a script that you had been working on.

Overall, the games were great fun and also a great learning opportunity for everyone involved. Sure there were complaints regarding grading and commenting from judges, but that shouldn’t hamper the fact that everyone still had fun and also learned something new about writing a script or advanced function.

Hope to see you all next year for the 2012 Scripting Games in April!