It’s less than two weeks until PowerShell Saturday #005 in Alpharetta, GA on October 26, 2013. Microsoft employees, MVPs, and community members have been gathered to present 15 sessions covering a wide range of topics. In addition to the sessions, we will have a hands-on-lab and an Iron Scripter scripting contest. Here are a few of the sessions that will be presented. Check the PowerShell Saturday #005 website for more information and to register. Since this is a community event, we want to showcase some of our local user group members. From the Atlanta PowerShell User Group we have Will Murphy and Russ Slater giving presentations. From the Charlotte PowerShell User Group we have Brian Wilhite and Jeremy Engel presenting. They are users just like you and I think they will bring a unique perspective to the sessions. Tommy Patterson, one of our local Microsoft Technical Evangelists, will be delivering a session on Deploying Virtual Machine Workloads to the Cloud with PowerShell. In the session, Tommy will cover the Windows Azure portal and toolsets. In addition to this session, he will also be hosting a Hands-On-Lab where you can bring your laptop and work directly with Azure while Tommy guides you through the process. In order to participate in the lab you should sign up for a free Azure trial before the event. Please visit www.azure.com to sign up for a trial. One of the newest PowerShell MVPs and longtime co-host of the PowerScripting Podcast, Jonathan Walz, will cover one of the most fundamental and most powerful feature of Windows PowerShell, the PowerShell pipeline. If you have a desire to learn and utilize PowerShell to the fullest, then I recommend you attend this session. Administrators almost never need to work on just a single machine; you have a whole slew of servers you need to manage. PowerShell Remoting allows you to script against one or many remote systems. It’s powerful, but, it can also be a little daunting. This year we are going to do something different. We are having two, yes two, sessions dedicated to Remoting offered in two part series. Depending on your level of comfort and desire you can come to one or both of the sessions. Of course, it wouldn’t be a PowerShell event without the Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson. Ed will be presenting two sessions. His session abstracts appear here: Beginner Track: To Script or not to Script: That is the question In this session I talk about the two ways to use Windows PowerShell, as a Scripting Language, and as a command line tool. I provide real world examples in which I talk about the advantages and the disadvantages of each approach to using this flexible and powerful scripting language. Specific scenarios include: single machine configuration and troubleshooting, single machine maintenance, multiple machine configuration, troubleshooting and maintenance and reuse of scripts by non-scripters. Advanced Track: PowerShell workflows for mere mortals

In this session, I talk about the Windows PowerShell workflow. I begin with an overview of the technology and identify specific scenarios in which using a Windows PowerShell workflow simplifies scripting challenges. I then look at the steps required to develop a workflow, and point out some of pitfalls to avoid. Finally, I show similarities and differences between workflows, functions, and modules.