Winter Scripting Games 2014

Get Ready! The Winter Scripting Games 2014 are starting very soon !! The Event 1 is scheduled to start this week-end (Jan 19th 2014)! The Games are an amazing opportunity to learn more about PowerShell. This is the kind of thing you don’t want to miss !!!

Last year I jumped in for the first time in the 2013 edition and this was really a lot of fun !!! It gave me a huge boost to my PowerShell Skills and so much more confidence in my scripting style !!! You can refer to my old blog posts for each Scripting Games 2013 events were I tried to analyze each of my solutions.

Back at the beginning of December I was actually offered by+Mike Robbins to Coach the teams, but since I had so much fun playing at the last games I decided to play again this year, couldn’t resist!!

For the 2014 Edition however, the formula of the Scripting Games is a bit different:

* Teams: This edition of the Scripting Games is a team work event ! No more Solo mode, participants have to create or join a team (from 2 to a maximum of 6 team members), * Coaches: A list of experts will give advices/critics on the posted script via comments or blog posts. * Judges: A team of MVPs and Well-known PowerShell Guru will scores each of the scripts.

#powershell #pshgames portrait mode :) pic.twitter.com/cXgNIk8sYA — Francois-Xavier Cat (@LazyWinAdmin) January 5, 2014

Here is my setup for the scripting games :-) (Coffee is a huge friend)!

Winter Scripting Games 2014

Here are the most important Information you will need for the games. Note that the Time is UTC/GMT. For example January 19th 00:00 GMT means 18:00/6:00pm Eastern Time (I was not able to submit one of my entry last year just for this reason… silly me..)

* Scripting Games Website * Scripting Games Guide * Understand the Scoring * Events Schedule
* EVENT #1 Pairs - From: 2014/01/18 00:00 GMT To: 2014/01/26 00:00 GMT * EVENT #2 Security FootPrint - From: 2014/01/25 00:00 GMT To: 2014/02/02 00:00 GMT * EVENT #3 Acl Calc Toil Trouble - From: 2014/02/01 00:00 GMT To: 2014/02/09 00:00 GMT * EVENT #4 Monitoring Support - From: 2014/02/08 00:00 GMT To: 2014/02/16 00:00 GMT

Stay Tunned !

* PowerShell.org posts * Twitter Tag #pshgames * Coaches Blog Posts : Additionally to the comments made on the submitted scripts, Coaches will publish articles about what they see good or wrong and will provide great tips to help you deliver the best solutions. Here is a list of the coaches:
* Boe Prox -@proxb - +Boe Prox</complete> </ul>
* Carlo Mancini - @sysadm2010 - +Carlo Sysadm * Claus Nielsen - @claustn - +Claus Thude Nielsen * Emin Atac - @p0w3rsh3ll - +Emin Atac
* Jan Egil Ring - @JanEgilRing - +Jan Egil Ring * Jeff Wouters - @JeffWouters - +Jeff Wouters * Jonathan Medd - @jonathanmedd - +Jonathan Medd * Lido Paglia - @nicemarmot - +Lido Paglia * Matt Hitchcock - @hitchysg * Rob Campbell - @mjolinor * Rohn Edwards - @magicrohn * Sahal Omer - @GetExchange * Steve Murawski - @StevenMurawski -+Steve Murawski </ul> * Judges
* Ed Wilson - @ScriptingGuys * Don Jones - @concentrateddon -+Don Jones * Jason Helmick - @TheJasonHelmicks - +Jason Helmick * Jeffery Hicks - @JeffHicks -+Jeffery Hicks
</ul> # PowerShell Resources
* Get-Help of course :-) (don't forget to Update-Help before!) * PowerShell.com released a great set of free ebooks on different PowerShell topics, Check those out! * PowerShell.org also released some great and neat (and FREE) ebooks too !! I highly recommend those, especially the "The Community Book of PowerShell Practices" result of the Great Debate 2013. </ul> # Team Work This is probably the most challenging part of the game, working all together, split the work, organize a few meetings (via Hangout) and stay up to date with who is doing what. Note:+Emin Atac released a nice article on "Game plan for high performing team". Since this event is a Team work task, we had to find a tool that can handle a few things : MUST HAVE
* Versioning/Version Control * PowerShell Syntax Highlightin * Private
NICE TO HAVE
* Multiple User live editing Or Pull Request System * Chat/Discussion * Cheap $$$ or Free
We tested a couple of tools like SkyDrive, GitHub, GoogleDocs, PiratePad, ... and we finally choose Github which is very popular and seem to match our most important needs. We had to pay a small 7$ fee to make it private during the time of the games, but this repository will be switched to public at the end of the event. # Team Posh Monks Finally, I want to introduce the team I will work with for the Winter Scripting Games 2014, the Posh Monks team!!
* Francois-Xavier Cat (Canada GMT -5:00) @LazyWinAdmin - Blog * Stephane Van Gulick (Switzerland GMT+1:00) @Stephanevg - Blog * Deepak Dhami (India GMT+5:30) @DexterPOSH - Blog * Allister Philippe (France GMT+1:00) * Benjamin Rouleau (France GMT+1:00) * Guido Oliviera (Brazil GMT -3:00) @_Guido_Oliveira - Blog
As you can see we are almost all on a different TimeZones, so this will probably very challenging, but I'm sure we'll have some great fun :-)