Dear diary,

Well, I hoped I managed in scaring you with that one. Don’t worry, this won’t be a diary but a description of the first day of my visit to the PowerShell Summit 2013 held at Microsoft Corporate in Redmond (Washington state).
The day started for me with a breakfast together with Jeffery Snover. Because I knew that I was going to be at Microsoft Corp I dropped him an email asking if he would have time for a small meet ‘n greet. So I was very happily surprised that he actually replied and told me that we would be able to find a small gap in his calendar. So of course he wasn’t able to tell my anything about the future of PowerShell or anything like that but I still found it to be very interesting to meet him and to pick his brain as far as that was possible without there being a risk of him telling me something he wasn’t supposed to. So we talked about the Monad Manifest, my MVP award and a whole bunch of other stuff.

After the breakfast we went to back to the event because the sessions were starting. The first was by Ed Wilson (The Microsoft Scripting Guy) where he was talking about writing modules instead of scripts, why you should do that and  how easy it actually is…
Next up was Richard Siddaway about CIM sessions. Now this session was a perfect example why this event is not for newbies at PowerShell. It was high technical, very fast paced and just amazing to see Richard live in action.
The third session I attended was by Jeff Hicks. He was talking about creating some very ‘manager friendly’ HTML reports through PowerShell where he was not only using HTML but also CSS for the make-up of the report. A very interesting session because he basically showed a way to create some amazing HTML reports by combining PowerShell, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Next there was a very kind PFE from Microsoft that was also attending the event that was planning on visiting the Microsoft store in Bellevue to replace his keypad of his Surface device. Well, one of the things I wanted to do while I am here is to get myself a Surface RT device. Why a RT and not a Pro? That’s a subject for another post…
So we drove to the Microsoft store and guess what… I’m typing this post on my new toy!

When we got back I attended one other session. This one was by Alessandra Nikolai about PowerShell workflow… a great new feature which I’ve blogged about on the Hey! Scripting Guy blog. Aleksandar did an amazing job and yet again I was just taking the information provided in a session like a sponge 🙂

At the end of the day I went with a group to get some dinner… just a little group, about 27 people 😉

I hope that I’ve been able to give you an idea on what you’re missing and that I have motivated you to attend the event next year. If you’re still in doubt than read my blog post that I’ll be posting tomorrow about day nr. 2 😛