PowerShell had a really big presence at MMS2007. There was a good presence at the exhibition center with a number of vendors demonstrating their PowerShell support. We had a good number of dedicated sessions and it was include in quite a few of the other sessions. Any why not, with PowerShell, teams can do a little bit of work and then deliver an incredibly powerful (there is that word again) experience to end users. It is clearly one of the best deals going in terms of benefit per line of code written.

Customer feedback was almost uniformly very positive. We got quite a bit of feedback indicating that we had not done a very good job at making training available. People are too polite – we offer no training. The good news is that this void is being rapidly filled by the marketplace.

We’re seeing some great things happening on the training front for Windows PowerShell. A number of vendors are offering instructor-led courses and there are a couple of self-paced on-line training available as well. In the instructor lead category you’ve got a few to choose from: http://desktopengineer.com/ps310 is offering a three-day course in various cities, and http://www.scriptingtraining.com is also offering a class (using courseware authored by PowerShell MVP and author Don Jones) in Las Vegas. Don is the co-author of the Windows PowerShell TFM book and has presented at some of my talks. (I had the pleasure of sitting next to Don during a long dinner in Barcelona where he explained his approach to teaching various PowerShell concepts. It sounded great.) Don’s class comes with a special offer: Register with referral code “PSHBLOG” and you’ll receive a take-home self-paced training kit (http://www.scriptingtraining.com/psh101.asp), which you can either share with a co-worker who wants to learn PowerShell, or use on your own as a refresher course whenever you feel the need.

Are you a trainer or a training center? http://msgoodies.blogspot.com/2007/04/powershell-training-in-denmark.html describes PowerShell courseware available in Denmark, and http://www.scriptingtraining.com/pshkit.asp is Don’s PowerShell courseware packaged for worldwide trainers and training centers. Another on-line training course is being developed by the folks over at http://www.Training4SystemCenter.com .

There are even murmurs of a PowerShell mini-conference coming late this year… more details on that as things solidify (but you might consider having some reserve conference budget available in this fall).

With all of these classes and courseware, not to mention books and training videos, there’s no excuse to put off learning PowerShell any longer!

Join the command-line revolution!

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
Windows Management Partner Architect
Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell
Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx