PSConf EU Summary Day 1

This week I attended the PowerShell Conference EU in Hannover in Germany and it was one of the best PowerShell conferences I attended until now. It started with the Agenda Competition for which I created an VSCode extension.

How cool is that?

I attended the following sessions during the 3 days at the PSConfEU conference:

Agenda:

Summary

Here is my summary from some of the sessions I followed on the first day.

Session: Opening Ceremony

Tobias did a great job to feel us all welcome at the PSConfEu.

And in the mean time an attendee sitting besides me installed my VSCode extension. Cool to see people use things I created.

Session: Keynote: State of the Union

Jeffrey Snover answered the question if “PowerShell was done?” His answer to this was Yes… and No. The new mission of PowerShell is now “Being the connector of the Hybrid Cloud”

Core PowerShell will be the connector for the Hybrid Cloud. Not Windows PowerShell. There is a difference between Windows PowerShell and Core PowerShell. Check Jeffrey’s reaction on this on twitter.

Jeffrey also mentioned VSCode and the PowerShell Extension which David Wilson developed. The reason according to Jeffrey why we developed VSCode and the VSCode Extension is that “we wanted a first class PowerShell editor on Linux” Check out the reactions on twitter.

Jeffrey also talked about Core PowerShell in Azure, like Cloud Command Shell. (PowerShell will be added soon besides Bash). DSC as Native Azure Configuration. That means a Common Windows & Linux LCM, Multiple LCM Instances, Native code LCM for lightweight environments and LCM as Library.

You can watch the complete Keynote on YouTube.

Session: PowerShell Warm-Up: Quiz & Quirks

Tobias got the crowd warmed-up with his Quiz & Quirks and of the quirks he showed was fixing Return Values.

 #Fixing Return Values by Tobias Weltner
Function Test-Something {
 $null = . {
        "I can leave behind whatever I want"
        get-service
        'all goes to $null'
    }

    # Her I am declaring my ONLY return value
    # (just like any other scripting language)
    return 'true return value'
}

You can watch the YouTube video here.

Session: Catch Me If You Can - PowerShell Red vs. Blue

Will Schroeder talked about how attackers are using PowerShell and it turns out they are turning away from PowerShell and now trying different ways to attack our systems.

You can watch the YouTube video here.

Session: Hell freezing over: PowerShell on Linux and GitHub Bartek Bielawski and Daniel Both drove with me to Hannover and during our road-trip we had some great conversations about their sessions already.

It was cool to see how you could use PowerShell on Linux and even use VSCode on Linux!

Session: Getting started with Windows Server Containers

Flynn Bundy walked us through the why, what and how Windows Server Containers and had some great demos.

He talked about which issues Containers can help solve.

• Windows Updates
• User Management
• Unrequired Features
• Configuration Drift
• Configuration Management
• Large Management Overhead
• Unrequired Process
• Image Size
• Clustering
• Storage Issues
• Start-Up Times

Definitively a session worth re-watching when published on the YouTube Channel of PSConfEU!

Session: Auto-generated User Interfaces with Phosphor

David Wilson showed Phosphor, which is a PowerShell module designed for generating user interfaces from PowerShell modules. Keep in mind that this project is to be considered a proof-of-concept and not a supported Microsoft product.

How does it work?

• Host ASP.NET Core inside of PowerShell
• HTML/JS UI exposed as static files
• Talks to REST Service in PowerShell
• UI generated based on responses from REST Service
• Service supports multiple sessions, windows.

Future direction of Phosphor:

• Generalize UI model
• Create simple DSL for UI Authoring
• Potentially support multiple front-ends
  • Native desktop (UI (WPF, GTK)
  • VS Code extension UI
  • Azure Portal
• Help Viewer (and possibly editor?)

You can download the code from Github and follow the build steps to manually install the module. The build script does not work according to David.

Here is an example when I used the following command:

 show-module -Module  Microsoft.PowerShell.Management

If you get below message when running redo the following steps:

 cd src/Phosphor.Client
npm install
npm run tsc

Those steps fixed my initial issue.

Why is Phosphor such a cool project? This will help you create PowerShell-based user interfaces in any platform or UI framework. For more ideas check out the goals section on the Github Phosphor page.

And the cool thing of Phosphor is that is has a REST API you can call. Make sure you have started Phosphor and run the following commands:

 #Load Module
Import-Module .\src\Phosphor\Phosphor.psd1

#Start Phosphor
Show-Module -Module Microsoft.PowerShell.Management

# calling phoshop REST API
# Get Processes
$SessionNumber = 1
$EndPoint = {https://localhost:5001/api/sessions/ {0}} -f $SessionNumber 
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "$EndPoint/modules/items/Process" -OutVariable Processes

# Get Services
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "$EndPoint/modules/items/Service" -OutVariable Services

$Services.Items | Get-Member

#Stopping Bits Service via Phoshor
#Invoke-RestMethod -Uri 'https://localhost:5001/run?command=Stop-Service¶ms=-InputObject=spooler&-OutVariable=service'

#Get session info
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $EndPoint -OutVariable Session
$Session | Get-Member

$Session.model.modules | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Nouns

Keep in mind this a Proof of Concept and things are likely to change. David told me the REST API will have some changes too.

Let’s start contributing by cloning the repo and submit ideas to David.

Session: The Release Pipeline in Practice Matt Hitchcock talked how to implement a Release Pipeline for DSC. One of the tips he had to implement Rollback into your DSC configurations is to first create an Absent Configuration in your DSC Configuration and change that later to Present. Great tip from Matt, which I’m going to implement in my DSC Configurations too.

Definitively as session to watch when published on the PSConfEU YouTube Channel.

Evening Event

The Evening Event took place at Hannover Zoo and offered a great way to network and have great conversations with many PowerShell minded people.

David with the PSConfEU Posse

This was a great ending of the first day of the PSConfEU. More info on the sessions in the next blog post.

References:

• PSConfEU webiste: https://www.psconf.eu/
• Tobias Weltner Twitter handle: https://twitter.com/TobiasPSP
• PSConfEU Github Repo: https://github.com/psconfeu
• PSConfEU YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxgrI58XiKnDDByjhRJs5fg
• PSConfEU Agenda Competition: https://www.powertheshell.com/agendacompetition/
• VSCode-PSConfEU2017 Extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=stefanstranger.vscode-psconfeu2017
• Phosphor Github Repo: https://github.com/PowerShell/Phosphor