Do you wish your favorite editor had better PowerShell editing support? Do you have a great idea for a new feature for the PowerShell extension in Visual Studio Code? We’re dedicating next week, December 6th through 13th (Sunday through next Sunday), to hacking together on new features to enable better PowerShell support in any editor!
Here’s the plan:
On Sunday, December 6th at 11AM-12PM PST (7-8PM GMT) I’ll host a Crowdcast event to give an overview of PowerShell Editor Services, the PowerShell extension for VS Code, and other general ideas for contributions that people can make. Participants can join to ask questions and discuss potential ideas so that we can get the ball rolling.
Once hacking has started, we’ll hang out together in the #editors channel of the PowerShell Slack Community so that everyone can get help on their contributions. We’ll be using these discussions to help flesh out documentation about these projects using the GitHub Wiki. Every question asked will be helpful so don’t be shy!
On the week following our hacktivities, I’ll release new builds of PowerShell Editor Services and the Visual Studio Code extension containing our collective efforts. I’ll also post a follow-up report here on PowerShell.org with details about all the contributions that were made in this time.
After a two week hiatus I am back this week with a quick write up on how to automate the updating of PowerShell help. Update-Help should be one of the first things typed in PowerShell on a new workstation build. I jump into the topic and demonstrate how to automate the updating of the help files from the Internet or from a local network share. You can view the full article over at PowerShellBlogger.com.
I look forward to getting another article out to everyone next week and I hope everyone in the US enjoys their long weekend!
UPDATE: The new venue will not be ready until next months’ meeting, so please meet us instead at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta, Microsoft Corporation
1125 Sanctuary Pkwy Ste 300, Alpharetta
Join us on Tuesday, December 8th when June Blender will be giving a talk on PowerShell Events! This will be in our brand-new venue and meeting place, Microsoft’s new Innovation Center, in the famous Atlanta Flat Iron building. Wear your Santa hats for a special door prize!
About June Blender
June Blender is a technology evangelist for SAPIEN Technologies, Inc. Formerly a Senior Programming Writer at Microsoft Corporation, she is best known for her work with the Windows PowerShell product team from 2006-2012, developing the help system and writing the Get-Help help topics for PowerShell 1.0 – 3.0. In other roles, June wrote content for the Azure Active Directory SDK and Azure PowerShell Help, Windows Driver Kits, Windows Support Tools, and Windows Resource Kits. She lives in magnificent Escalante, Utah, where she works remotely when she’s not out hiking, canyoneering, or convincing lost tourists to try Windows PowerShell. She is a Windows PowerShell MVP, a PowerShell Hero, an Honorary Scripting Guy, and a frequent contributor to PowerShell.org. Contact her at and follow her on the SAPIEN Blog and on Twitter at @juneb_get_help
Register now on Meetup!
Join us on Thursday, December 3rd when Adam Bertram will be giving a talk called a “Top 10 PowerShell mistakes "
About Adam Bertram
Adam Bertram is an independent consultant, technical writer, trainer and presenter. Adam specializes in consulting and evangelizing all things IT automation mainly focused around Windows PowerShell. Adam is a Microsoft Windows PowerShell MVP, 2015 powershell.org PowerShell hero and has numerous Microsoft IT pro certifications. He authors IT pro course content for Pluralsight, is a regular contributor to numerous print and online publications and presents at various user groups and conferences. You can find Adam at adamtheautomator.com or on Twitter at @adbertram.
We’ve finalised the agenda and we’re starting to publish session information on the web site at
https://eventloom.com/event/login/PSNA16
There are a handful of sessions on the site at present. The rest will be added over the next week or so.
Keep checking back to see who’s been added.
Registration opens 1 December 2015
Here’s everything that’s fit to print regarding Summit 2016, running April 3-4-5-6 in Bellevue, WA! You can also download: Brochure-PowerShell and DevOps Summit 2016 to share with your boss and team.
Registration
Registration for Summit will open December 1, 2015, and run through March 1, 2016. Visit the registration website for more details. Registration will be limited to about 200 attendees. Initially, we will only offer registration for a 4-day event, which includes full-day pre-conference sessions on April 3rd, 2016. On February 1st, 2016, we will open any remaining space for 3-day registration.
Our November 2015 puzzle comes from PowerShell.org user [Tim Curwick][1], who created the puzzle based on a challenge he ran across at work. There’s nothing more real-world than this!
The Call for Topics for the 2016 Summit is now closed. We’ve had an amazing number of top quality submissions. We’d like to thank everyone who took the time to submit a proposal for a session at the Summit. We’ll be working through the submissions over the next few days as we put the agenda together for what looks to be a superb Summit.
We’ll publish the schedule as soon as we can.
I addressed a reader requested script for my article this week. PowerShell gives you the ability to add computers to Active Directory right from the command line with the built in PowerShell commandlets. This was introduced with PowerShell version 3 and can be used to automate imaging processes or to prompt an agent for the desired computer name and organizational unit. This is useful since a lot of organizations will use specific OUs for computers according to location or department. This allows them to set group policies that apply to those computer accounts accordingly. By default these computer accounts are created in the root Computers OU, but creating an account can be targeted. The highlighted examples should provide you everything you need to tackle that use case. I provide the basics of adding a computer to the domain as well as prompting the user to enter the computer name and location. Head on over to PowershellBlogger.com for the full write up and thanks for everyone’s continued support!
