The games run from April 26th through to May 7th. There are two categories, VBScript or PowerShell, and two levels of difficulty: Beginner and Advanced.

Next Steps:
1. Sign up for the games
2. Take a look at the Study Guide if you want to prepare.
3. Checkout the extra prizes that you can win if you sign up to the Australian Team
4. Grab the Badge
5. Spread the word and join in using the Twitter hash tag #2010sg and if you feel lke it use the Twibbon
6. Script and have some fun!!

There’s also a FAQ and a forum to hang out in.

Good luck everyone :-)

This is to take advantage of PowerShell MVP, and all round scripting good guy Don Jones being in town. Don is on holiday on the east coast and he has kindly agreed to be hi-jacked on Thursday night to present a session for the User Group.

So, our agenda currently looks like this:

17:30 17:40 Introduction
17:40 – 18:00 Jeff Alexander – Windows PowerShell integration with Group policy in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
18:00 – 18:20 Adam Bell – Managing MDT 2010 with PowerShell
18:20 – 18:40 Don Jones – What You Should Care About in PowerShell v2
18:40 – 19:00 Q&A and informal chat amongst the group

Jeff, is actually in Canberra on Thursday so he’ll be taking advantage of Live Meeting to join us (details to follow).

Keep an eye on the UG website for details and please join us either online or in person if you’re in Sydney!

Jeremy has managed to get something for everybody with Information worker, Developer and IT Pro sessions available. Tickets are going fast, at last check there were TEN (10) left!

The full information is available from the Sharepoint Saturday Perth website and there will even be a PowerShell session available, where I’ll run through a fast paced Introduction to PowerShell.

I hope to see you there, but if not, I will post the my session here on the day. :-)

Unfortunately, due to a scheduling conflict at Microsoft Perth, we had moved our meeting from the end of November, to the beginning of December which inadvertantly caused a conflict with the .NET Community of Practice UG. This was a shame as there were a few members from the .NET UG who were keen to attend. In future we’re aiming for week 3 each month, which should prevent this happening.

Anyway, what made this a fun evening was that we had three presenters, all from different locations: Jame’s O’Neill (Microsoft Evangelist UK) from the UK, Shane Hoey (PowerShell User Group Australia), from Brisbane, and myself from Perth.

We had a modest turn out in the Microsoft Office’s in Perth as well as a few people logged into Live Meeting. We had a few technical issues, which is to be expected from a UG still finding it’s feet! Though nothing like the running battles Richard Siddaway used to have when I was in the UK!

Apparently editing the Live Meeting media file to clean it up results in an exponential increase in the files size. Seeing as it’s being made availble over the net it would seem like a good idea to keep it as small as possible, so I’ve take Marco Shaw’s advise and will make it available live, raw and unedited.

PowerShell User Group Australia – November 2009 Session

A summary of the session:

Adam Bell – Introductions (0m – 1m)
Adam Bell – 10 useful PowerShell Tricks (5m 5s – 26m)
James O’Neill – Managing Hyper-V (35m 50s -1h 32m)
Shane Hoey – Windows 7 PowerPack (1h 09m 25s – 1h 30m 05s)

Okay. We experienced a few issues, learnt a few things (like my wireless mike sleeping when not being used!) so the recording is a little raw. Hopefully, you’ll be able to see past that and find something in there that was interesting.

I’ve had a couple of requests so I’ll post my presentation up as a session in a few days and detail my demo’s.

The first meeting, in September, was a presentation style meeting, where two presentations were given to the audience in Perth. Courtesy of Microsoft Australia, Live Meeting was available to provide an online capability which was manned by Jeff Alexander. The attendance was modest, but as the only advertising was through this site and Twitter, that was to be expected. This was also to give me the chance to practice presenting to a room and handling the Live Meeting interface as well.

In an effort to reduce the strain on trying to get presenters and material together every month, we are trialing alternating the presentation style sessions with “script clubs”. The idea behind this is that the presentation sessions will follow the format that was used with the UK PowerShell Group (Get-PSUGUK) of 3x 20 minute sessions with a beer and pizza break to encourage the socialising side of the group. For these sessions we’re hoping to provide access to Live Meeting and make the recordings available on the UG website afterwards for download.

The script club is new to me, but is becoming popular with a lot of the PowerShell UG’s everywhere. The idea here is to turn up with your laptop and in a relaxed social environment get some hands on PowerShell scripting. Whether, this is best handled by setting small “challenges” to the group to encourage working out how to achieve this through PowerShell, or whether members of the group bring ideas, or problems with them that as a group we work out is yet to be seen, but I’m happy to look at both approaches. I’ll put a poll up and we’ll see what the interest is like.

I attended the .Net Community of Practice a couple of weeks ago to meet members of the Perth UG community and to spread the word of the PowerShell UG across a social beer afterwards. The intention isn’t to steal any members, but to raise awareness and get the word of mouth advertising amongst the Perth IT geeks. It was a great bunch of guys and Mitch had one of their biggest turn out’s of 63!

Last week, Mike invited me to present a small session with the Perth ALT.Net UG. This was a much less formal approach and I really enjoyed hanging out and talking to these guys about PowerShell. Talking to Developers provided a totally new approach to me as I expected them to have a great understand of the .Net classess and namespaces so with the help of Mike, showing some of the basic tasks that PowerShell can do was fun and the questions were interesting.

On the East coast, Shane Hoey has been running script clubs at Microsoft Brisbane. Details for the PowerShell UG are on the web site, and using the #PSUGAU hash tag in twitter.

The thing I have found the most interesting from my two visits is that the User Group community in Perth is vibrant, and there’s a lot of cool geeks to hang out and chat with. Over the next few months I’m hoping to attend more as my schedule permits and keep evangelising PowerShell. I’m still amazed how little IT pro’s seem to grasp what it’s capable of!

So, if you’re looking to get involved in your community, and want to find a User Group, check out the list of Microsoft Australian User groups, but be warned this link only plays nicely in IE.

For a good view of what’s new in 2 check out Joel “jaykul” Bennett’s excellent slide deck here

To add to the mammoth PowerShell support included in Windows 7, the Windows 7 Resource Kit also includes a PowerShell Pack which adds 10 modules to help supercharge your Windows PowerShell scripting:

WPK – Create rich user interfaces quick and easily from Windows PowerShell. Think HTA, but easy. Over 600 scripts to help you build quick user interfaces
TaskScheduler – List scheduled tasks, create or delete tasks
FileSystem – Monitor files and folders, check for duplicate files, and check disk space
IsePack – Supercharge your scripting in the Integrated Scripting Environment with over 35 shortcuts
DotNet – Explore loaded types, find commands that can work with a type, and explore how you can use PowerShell, DotNet and COM together
PSImageTools – Convert, rotate, scale, and crop images and get image metadata
PSRSS – Harness the FeedStore from PowerShell
PSSystemTools – Get Operating System or Hardware Information
PSUserTools – Get the users on a system, check for elevation, and start-processaadministrator
PSCodeGen -Generates PowerShell scripts, C# code, and P/Invoke

This is all well and good, but what about the other Microsoft Operating Systems? Well, now Microsoft have released the Windows Management Framework, which includes PowerShell 2.0, WinRM 2.0 and BITS 4.0 providing the same rich experience of PowerShell 2.0 for Vista, Server 2003 & 2008 and Windows XP.

Looks to me like Microsoft just super-sized my PowerShell options :-)

If you’re interested in PowerShell then you have probably already seen the news over at the Microsoft PowerShell Team Blog, but just in case I’ve linked to the three recent posts that I think are pretty much just awesome. Go take a look, you can bet I will be ;-)

Jonathan and Hal (from the PowerScripting Podcast) will be hosting Jeffrey Snover for a Virtual PowerShell V2 Launch Party on Thursday, which is of course GA* day for Windows 7!!

Lee Holmes from the PowerShell Team has also announced that one of their internal tools has been released as a Codeplex Project.

The Cmdlet Designer makes it much easier for teams to concentrate on the design, naming, and consistency of their cmdlets, while also guaranteeing name registration and collision avoidance across Microsoft.

To sweeten the deal, it offers:

* Integrated help authoring
* Efficient bulk operations (parameter and cmdlet cloning)
* Generation of cmdlet code
* Full scripting support
* Automatic code-spec comparison and testing
* Role-based security, history logging, and more.

But wait, there’s more! It’s now available under MS-PL from http://www.codeplex.com/CmdletDesigner

And last, but in no means least, with the recent announcement of the Windows 7 Resource Kit book comes the availablity of the Windows 7 Resource Kit PowerShell Pack. There’s a detailed breakdown of the features in the PowerShell Team’s blog post, but in a brief look it contains: 10 modules with 600+ scripts. Great work James!

* General Availablity.

Since returning home I’ve really missed the community and interest around PowerShell. After talking to some of the Microsoft cool cats on the east coast, I’ve organised to commence the PSUGAU.

The idea is to give the group a national focus rather than just solely Perth IT geeks. We hope to achieve this by utilising Live Meeting to give anyone interested the opportunity to join us online. This will also allow me to invite PowerShell guest presenters to help mix things up and bring in some great experience from the wider community.

I’m still in the process of working out where we can host the user group, and I’m trying to get the website operational (watch this space), but the intention is to have the inaugural meeting around the end of September.

If you’re interested in coming along and getting involved then ping me an email so I know how much pizza to order! There’s also a poll on the front page to get an indication on your meeting preferences.

A couple of years later, and PowerShell has become way more pervasive and is going to continue to get more and more penetration into our daily IT infrastructure – Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are excellent examples of how this is going to accelerate PowerShell’s visibility and wider use.

I’m thinking that the PowerShell Toolbox page is in desperate need of an update. So, over the next week or so I’ll go through and give it a spring clean and add new popular tools to it.

If you’re intersted, feel free to drop a comment here listing your favourites, and I’ll make sure they get added to the page.

sort-object

[ps collapse=”false” firstline=”1″ gutter=”false” highlight=”” tabsize=”4″ toolbar=”false”]
$scores | Get-Member
[/ps]

sort-object example 2

sort-object example 3