Thursday, April 9, 2009

HIMSS - MSHUG Presentation

I had the opportunity to evangelize about PowerShell at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) - Microsoft Health Users Group (MSHUG) last Saturday (4/4/2009). Other then my laptop freezing in the first ten minutes of the presentation, all went well. Given that I only had about 50 minutes, I decided to focus on "what" PowerShell can do versus "how". So I demonstrated the following:

There were not nearly as many questions as I had anticipate (perhaps following lunch had a little to do with that).  Of the questions asked, a couple stood out.

  • Why not continue to use VBScript and/or Perl
  • Can scripts be compiled

Was able to reiterate the point that if you are moving forward with Microsoft, you really have no choice.  Throughout the session I tried to emphasize the power of objects and how utilizing them makes a systems admin job so much easier. As far as compiling is concerned, my response was “if compiling them is a requirement, then you should look at writing it in C# instead”.  Would be interested in seeing how others would have responded.

I want to thank the following people for sending PowerShell related materials for distribution at the session:

  • Susan Roper (Quest Software)
  • SoftwareFX sales staff
  • Jeffery Hicks (Sapien Technologies)

Enjoy!

1 comment:

marco.shaw said...

On the topic of compiling... Is that to hide the logic or make it faster? Yes, I would also answer "C#" in general, but it depends on the context of the question...