DogFoodCon 2013: From Cmdlets to Scripts to PowerShell Hero: An essential session on the scripting process

Article
11/25/2013

Session Description

Tired of copying and pasting scripts from the internet? Want to write your own scripts? Become the go-to scripter on your team. This session will break down the scripting process into logical steps you can follow. Learn how to wrap cmdlets into scripts into functions into modules that you can reuse and share with your team.

Give a man a script; feed him for a Get-Date. Teach a man to script; feed him for a New-TimeSpan.

Lao Tzu, 4th century BC

DogFoodCon

Last Friday I presented at DogFoodCon in Columbus, Ohio. It was great to reconnect with familiar faces and to meet some new ones. I delivered two sessions:

It's Time To Part With Blankie: Moving from command line tools to PowerShell for Active Directory. If you missed this session you can watch the recording from the same session I delivered at PowerShell Saturday 005 Atlanta.
From Cmdlets to Scripts to PowerShell Hero: An essential session on the scripting process. This session, the scripts, resources, and recording are featured in today’s post. If you would like to see this session live, then come join us for PowerShell Saturday 007 Charlotte.

My goal in this session was to help people move from “copy and paste” scripters to “I can do this” scripters. I wanted to demystify the scripting process for beginners. It would be easy to spend a whole day covering this topic, so this session is a good intro to the creative process of beginning a script. We focused mostly on the overview and the cmdlets discovery process.

Download the demo scripts and slides attached at the bottom of this blog post.