Just Add Code

For the fourth Twin Cities Code Camp I gave a presentation on Extending PowerShell for developers.  Turnout was great yet again at Code Camp, pretty much every session filled up.  The enthusiasm of the people who attend these sessions really make it a fun place to present.  I had a great group in my session, they helped make it into a very interactive presentation.

I started with scripting in PowerShell, then moved into dynamically adding members (properties and functions) to objects.  The PS1XML file is available for download.  Additionally, if you were interested in another example of this, the PowerShell for SharePoint Developers session I did at DevConnections has another good example of where a PS1XML can be used.

A Cmdlet and SnapIn were created using David Aiken‘s great PowerShell Visual Studio templates.  It demo’d passing parameters to a Cmdlet and having it return an array of items back to the Pipeline.  I also showed two implementations of hosting PowerShell; one for running a command from your app, and the other for replacing the UI entirely.

Slides
Code

One session down, two to go.  I got my first DevConnections session under my belt.  One of the things I’ll try to do is turn some of my slides and discussion points into charts/datasheets.  The feature ‘gotchas’ and ActivationDependency restrictions are excellent candidates for this.

As promised, here is the slide deck and code samples.  Enjoy!

Today was my first full day at DevConnections in Vegas.  I spent part of the day going to sessions, and squeezed some time in for some last minute work on my sessions.  Its been great to be here with some of my coworkers, including Mike who’s been posting some great updates of the conference.

My Speaking Schedule:

• Wednesday
• Advanced Feature Development
• When: 2:30pm
• Where: Mandalay Bay B
• Thursday
• Customizing the SharePoint Mobile Experience
• When: 11:15am
• Where: Mandalay Bay B
• PowerShell for SharePoint Developers
• When: 2pm
• Where Mandalay Bay B

I’ll be posting the slides and code for the sessions after I give them.

If you’re in town for DevConnections, drop me a line!

Last weekend I was able to present two sessions at the Twin Cities Code Camp. One on WebPart Development and the other on PowerShell.

WebPart Development Chalk Talk

I covered some common development scenarios: basic webparts, connectable webparts and using ASP User Controls with the SmartPart. I have all the code from the presentation.

Introduction to PowerShell

This session was hard to prepare for because I wanted to have everyone leave understanding all the great functionality of PowerShell and able to use it for more than a basic shell. I think it turned out pretty well. I was able to cover a lot of different areas of PowerShell in a reasonably coherent manner. The group seemed pretty interested and asked some really great questions. One of those questions taught me a valuable lesson: “Don’t do a recurse get-content to the screen unless you’re sure there aren’t any binary files in the directories”. During the course of attempting to answer a question I accidentally did a ‘get-content’ against a large ISO file. My computer wouldn’t stop beeping, no amount of CTRL-C or Task Kill would make it stop. I ended up having to do the last 5 minutes without my deck..presentations are always fun!

Special thanks to Karl for providing me with some copies of PowerShell Analyzer to give away to the attendees.
Links from the session:

• PowerShell Analyzer
• PowerTab
• Console
• PowerShell Community Extensions
• PowerShell Remoting

At the last Code Camp I presented on SharePoint, this time on WebParts and PowerShell…I think there’s a trend in me presenting on topics with BigLetters in their names. We’ll see what happens next time! Thanks again to Jason for putting everything together.

The PowerShell Remoting project now has a new home on CodePlex. Since GotDotNet is phasing out their workspaces, it was a good time to move the project over to CodePlex. I’m already enjoying the TFS based source control. There is also a good interface to use for bug tracking. Now is also a great time to request a new feature so we can get it into the next release.

Not familiar with the PowerShell Remoting project? PowerShell Remoting is a client/server app that allows you to use PowerShell to connect to another host and issue commands. Think of it as SSH for Windows, only instead of a something like an .rhosts file, you can log in with your domain credentials to skip entering a password. If you have to manage multiple machines, and you like PowerShell, this should probably be in your toolkit.

Here’s the presentation I did for the Twin Cities Code Camp around SharePoint as a Development Platform.

Welcome to those of you hitting here from the Twin Cities Code Camp. As you can probably see, there are a few cobwebs here.
I’ll be doing a presentation on using SharePoint as a Development Platform. With all the recent activity around the SharePoint 2007 release, developers (or at least their bosses) are more interested in how they can use SharePoint in their organization. I’ll be covering what things to consider when deciding whether or not to use SharePoint, and then how to actually develop againist it. There will be code examples for the three major approaches (object model, web services and RPC).
All the code and slides will be posted here for those who couldn’t make it, or really want to try out the code.

After three years of failing my resolution, I finally have a blog. My goal is to have a blog filled with technical content, not just links to ‘cool’ things. My interests in Tech are pretty diverse, and I realize not everyone who reads this blog will be as interested in all of those things as I am. To better facilitate readers that only enjoy certain topics, I’ll be using Categories and providing Category level RSS feeds. For those trying to find a specific article, hopefully the Search bar will help you out.

The guts behind this blog is Typo. Typo is a Ruby on Rails blogging application. Why’d I decide to use this? Well, I develop with MS products for my day job and I decided that doing something different for fun is always good. I’ve been following Rails pretty much since its inception. Why didn’t I choose WordPress or Moveable Type/Typepad? They run on non-MS platforms too. I’ve looked at Moveable Type, and it just doesn’t feel like any fun. And I had been leaning toward using WordPress (and even had it installed for one of the year’s resolutions), and having a strong PHP background it definitely made sense. But the big reason was I’m tired of patching. PHP needs patching, WordPress needs patching…constantly. There’s only so much time in the day. Ruby and Typo have and will have similar problems, but the process for upgrading is simpler that I’d rather go with it. We’ll see how it works out.

Anyway, welcome. Take your shoes off, stay a while.