Writing Robust Code

Will your script ever fail? Have you tested every scenario? What could happen if it went wrong?
This session will explain the importance of why you should write robust code, from scratch, not retrofit, and demonstrate a number of good habits to get into that Guy has learnt across his 5 decades of professional coding. It will also show bad habits & explain the pitfalls. Take your scripts to the next level & spend less time debugging & supporting them.

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Writing Bullet Proof yet Flexible Scripts

How to write code that behaves impeccably in situations you never expected it to encounter, thus helping you and the script users. Covers much more than just error and exception handling.

Writing a Script from Scratch

How to take a blank window and turn it into a script to be proud of - a work of art even perhaps.
See how Guy approaches this important task and why he rarely needs to change/refactor the code because of his guiding principle "write it once, write it right" rather than "fleshing out" or "hardening" scripts later once the script concept is proven.

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Working with Data File Formats in PowerShell

PowerShell can be used to view and manipulate many different file formats, used by many different applications and operating system processes. This session, together with live demos and a reference slide deck, will show you quick and efficient ways to not only process what is in these files but also to alter them. Formats covered include txt, json, csv, xml, clixml, html & others that Guy has used in anger. This can help visualisation and understanding of applications settings and troubleshooting data

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Using Azure REST APIs via PowerShell

Whilst PowerShell modules and SDKs are an alternative to calling REST APIs, calling them from PowerShell gives you platform independence, speed, flexibility & no pre-requisites which can be a barrier to adoption. This session shows how to use multiple Azure REST APIs including AVD. Once you know how to call one vendor's API, it's easy to use another's.

Using REST APIs via PowerShell

Whilst many PowerShell modules and SDKs are an alternative to calling REST APIs, calling them from PowerShell gives you platform independence & no pre-requisites which can be a barrier to adoption. This session shows how to use multiple vendor's REST APIs including Azure & one you know how to call one vendor's API, it's easy to use another's.

Runspaces – Let’s Work in Parallel

Runspaces can be used in a number of different ways to achieve faster running scripts, for example querying event logs on hundreds of machines simultaneously rather than sequentially. The session shows how to do this such that the code is easily reusable and includes how to pass data in and retrieve objects and stream output from runspaces.

Troubleshooting Windows Problems using PowerShell

How to use PowerShell to quickly analyse, find and remediate typical problems found in Microsoft Windows

Rule Regex with PowerShell

Regex is a much maligned feature & people seem scared to use it yet is can be very powerful with little effort so what this session will show are examples of the many different problems that they can be used to solve via PowerShell. For instance, parse text input/output/files quickly, clean inputs, process log data efficiently and much more and all without anything looking like a cat walked across the keyboard!

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Regex for the Real World

See how regular expressions are very useful for verifying and parsing data such as log file entries, cloud URIs, input data and do not need to be scary when you know the basics which is mostly all you will ever need.

PowerShell Performance Tips

Sharing from my 5 decades of software development experience to show tips and techniques on how to write efficient yet readable code. Showing what is good, bad and ugly especially when looping & also how to use various collection types for data caching.

Caching Data in PowerShell

It is often the case that data for a script must be obtained from external sources such as Active Directory, cloud providers, databases & more but do you get the items individually or in one go and if the latter, how do you store and retrieve the data? How do you decide which approach to use? What about a hybrid mechanism? Various data structures can be used , the choice depending on the attributes & characteristics of the data & how it needs to be retrieved.
This session will give real life examples of different types of caching, both in terms of fetching from source & subsequent local retrieval in order to speed up your code and potentially reduce bandwidth usage, cost & rate limit issues.

New session

Automating VMware via PowerCLI

Learn how to install, authenticate and use VMware's PowerShell PowerCLI modules to automate many aspects of vSphere automation such as creating and changing VMs and manipulating snapshots as well as Horizon common operations