Manfred Wallner
problem solver at ksengineers
Graz, Austria
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Manfred is a software development engineer in Graz, Austria.
With over 15 years of experience, he has contributed to a wide range of projects, including work for TV-broadcasting providers, research and development, performance analysis and optimization in automotive engineering, and software deployment & configuration automation.
In his spare time, Manfred actively contributes to the Chocolatey community and enjoys building various projects and tools. He also builds things with wood and often tries (with little success) to outrun his Border Collie dog.
Area of Expertise
Topics
tighten the loop by killing golden images - bring Chocolatey to your organization
Setting up Windows development boxes has been a cumbersome task for way to long! This talk tells the journey a medium-sized software development department took on to drastically improve the way it deals with dev-tools deployment. It includes core concepts on how to work with Chocolatey CLI from PowerShell as well as a couple of useful snippets that play nicely with the CI server of your choice.
So Long, Legacy SCM, and Thanks for All the Commits
Migrating from a legacy source control system to Git preserving your project’s history, branches, authorship, and timestamps.
In this session, we’ll explore how to perform a full migration from Subversion/AccuRev/Mercurial/YouNameIt while keeping all relevant information intact.
You’ll learn how to synthetically recreate commits, accurately capture branching structures, and maintain correct author and time metadata, ensuring your team doesn’t lose context or traceability during the transition.
powercharge your box setups with Boxstarter
This talk will revisit some lessons learned from scaling development infrastructure from small to large teams. A couple of small PowerShell system-setup scripts are created which are helpful on their own, but team up to perform a fully-automated, complex dev-box setup that requires multiple reboots and yet no user-interaction. Backed by PowerShell, Boxstarter and Pester, you’re ready to scale your environment in the coming decade.
PSAntiSnowflake: DON'T PANIC when containers are not an option
Special Hardware requirements or high-performance applications sometimes rule out the use of containers.
When security constraints require air-gapped*ish environments, publicly available resources usually break at the dependency chain.
State[fulness] is a big problem in CI/CD pipelines, servers become snowflakes and builds become unreproducible.
These issues can be tackled by a straight-forward and easy-to-implement pattern:
```
$s = Get-CurrentState
try { something }
finally { Restore-State $s }
```
In this session, we'll explore how such a pattern could be implemented in a build environment such as Jenkins CI.
Creating a minimal DSL that detects and rolls back
* software installations
* registry modifications
* configuration file changes
Profiling and Debugging Strategies for Infrastructure Services and Build Pipelines
Our Computers are CRAZY FAST - but only if we let them. Join a DevOps person getting frustrated with a somewhat sluggish system, digging down to the root cause and fixing it.
When we deal with complex systems it often is assumed that the workloads we dispatch to our machines are the main culprit of slow responsiveness or giving a concrete example: long-running build pipelines. Fortunately for us, even for long-running build pipelines, this can be far off from what's going on under the hood and we can potentially speed things up without even touching the actual workload.
Follow along on a deep dive analyzing the responsiveness of a CI system, using browser-integrated dev-tools to break down performance of http requests, digging deeper into profiling and debugging PowerShell and C#. A glimpse into Windows ETW demonstrates the lengths a motivated developer may go to achieve optimal runtime behavior.
Once the root cause of poor performance is identified a few layers down, it is trivial to achieve significant improvements on the user-facing side.
People often struggle with very large and small numbers; developers, being people too, sometimes need to be reminded of what modern CPUs are capable of doing in sub-second time.
may the debugger be with you, 2026 edition
Being able to debug a malfunctioning piece of software is a must-have skill for every developer and sysadmin. Equally important is being able to capture the state of a running script in production to troubleshoot and fix issues efficiently.
This presentation dives into how the Visual Studio Code debugger can be used to track what’s happening during the execution of PowerShell code. Using a few code samples, (non-obvious) bugs can be discovered and understood in practically no time.
Key debugging principles, navigation techniques, and the most useful VSCode view elements are demonstrated with real-world use cases, showing how to inspect, pause, and analyze scripts in both development and production environments.
may the debugger be with you
Being able to debug a malfunctioning piece of software is a must-have skill of every developer and sysadmin.
This presentation takes a dive into how the Visual Studio Code debugger can be used to track what's going on during the execution of PowerShell code.
Given a couple of code samples, (non-obvious) bugs can be discovered in practically no time.
The most important aspect of debugging code, navigation principles and view elements of vscode are demonstrated with real-world use cases.
Demystifying PowerShell DSLs
* WHAT is a DSL?
* HOW do PowerShell DSLs work?
This talk covers everything you need to know about PowerShell DSLs, highlight PowerShell modules Pester and Invoke-Build and peek into how they provide their DSL experience everyone loves.
No prior knowledge of the AST or PowerShell entrails required, we focus on how to leverage Cmdlets and how they can be combined to achieve more.
Thorough the session, a expressive PowerShell DSL will be created that can be used to monitor the state and health of a given IT infrastructure.
A Invoke-Build-like module is created step-by-step that does not only extend Pester, but also uses Pester to validate it works correctly (in combination with ANTLR).
Keep your stopwatch ready, at the end of the presentation, a second (minimal) DSL for Vega-Lite will be created in less than 10 minutes - adding some nice visualization on top of the infra-health DSL.
How hard can it be to count a few XML nodes?
It turns out the answer depends a lot on the language, the parser, and the file size. etc.
Let's compare languages, parser models, and real-world tradeoffs - less about “which language is best” and more about how easily performance assumptions can fall apart once you start measuring.
Chocolatey at Ludicrous Speed 🚀
We do all sorts of crazy things to keep our customers happy, especially when we're in devops and your coworkers are your main customers.
Some years ago, I implemented "Rocolatey" which allows to check for outdated Chocolatey packages more than 100x faster than choco.exe itself. Having this tool allowed us to scale our internal package deployments way faster and further than we had planned for.
Think about this way: when doing hundreds of builds per day, you don't want your CI-system to waste a minute before each and every build for something that clearly can be done in sub-second time.
Follow a dev-devops person down a rabbit hole, - making experiments, firing up profilers, dig into some C# code and ultimately decide to rewrite parts of a well established and great tool. The first version of the tool - written in PowerShell demonstrates that PowerShell can in fact be much faster than C# code, given we use a better algorithm/approach, is ultimately retired in favor of a blazing fast native implementation with Rust.
This talk will spotlight Chocolatey, some basic algorithms, C#, PowerShell, Rust and VSCode.
When XML Gets Huge - Parsers and Languages in Practice
This session started as a simple curiosity: how hard can it be to count a few XML nodes? It turns out the answer depends a lot on the language, the parser, and the file size. In my pet project xml-i ("xml-eye"), I implemented the same basic XML-processing task - counting different nodes - across a range of languages including Rust, C++, Java, .NET, and PowerShell, and ran it on files from small test cases all the way up to multi-GB inputs.
This talk is a practical comparison of languages, parser models, and real-world tradeoffs - less about “which language is best” and more about how easily performance assumptions can fall apart once you start measuring.
PowerShell Conference Europe 2026 Sessionize Event
psconf.eu 2024 Sessionize Event
psconf.eu 2023 Sessionize Event
psconf.eu 2022 Sessionize Event
Scottish PowerShell User Group - November 2019 Meetup
Remote Talk: Creating Your Custom Infrastructure Testing DSL with PowerShell & Pester
WinOps London 2019
Talk: Automated Software and Configuration Deployment Using PowerShell and Chocolatey
Grazer Linuxtage 2019
Talk: WSL, PowerShell & Chocolatey: Ein Hauch von Linux
Chocolatey Fest 2018
Talk: Killing Golden Images In Your Infrastructure Setups
Grazer Linuxtage 2017
Talk: Raspberry Pi Projekte
Grazer Linuxtage 2015
Talk: Raspberry Pi Evolution und Projekte
Grazer Linuxtage 2014
Talk: Steuern und Messen mit Raspberry Pi
Software Freedom Day Graz 2013
Talk: Raspberry Pi als Thin Client
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