Scripting Games 2011 – be prepared! :)

Only 12 days to Scripting Games 2011! Be prepared!

Why would I care?

If you like PowerShell, and like to learn, and like to have fun doing both – Scripting Games are there for you. If you are just starting – read awesome posts co-authored by Scripting Wife and try it with beginner division. If you are scripting a while already and feel that you can do more than solve simple tasks – there is division for you (us… :D) as well! If you are worried what good can you get from solving some fictional problems – take a look at last year’s scripting games. Do you see something that will never-ever happen to you? If you are admin you probably had such and/ or similar problems on your plate in the past. Wouldn’t it be great to have skills required to automate solution next time they will come? And trust me, knowing techniques when you need a prompt solution is good thing. Learning new things while your head is on fire is straight way to heart attack or something worse than that… 😉

Where do I start?

The best place to start is 2011 Scripting Games: All Links on One Page article on Hey, Scripting Guys! blog. You will get there from any other blog that is supporting Scripting Games. All you need is click on Mr Scripto. Suspect looks like that and is wanted alive:

Grab this badge here!

You will see all articles tagged for Scripting Games there. 🙂 I would suggest starting with study guide, and don’t miss any of ‘Scripting Wife’ articles. Even if you knew ‘all that’ already, it’s really fun to read.

But you see… I’m busy around here?

If you reading this you probably know that PowerShell is there to make your life easier. So… First of all you can make title of your PowerShell window remind you about days left till Scripting Games will start:

$Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle = "Only {0} days to Scripting Games!" -f (New-TimeSpan -End '4/4/11').Days

If you live in a PowerShell.exe you may want to have it your prompt, so you won’t miss it:

function prompt {            
<#
    Whatever you need goes here, eg:
#>            
    Write-Host "$pwd To SG: " -NoNewline            
# piece of code to produce info about days to SG with proper colour. 😉            
    $DaysToSG = (New-TimeSpan -End '4/4/11').Days            
    switch ($DaysToSG) {            
        { $_ -lt 3 } { $Fore = 'Red'; break }            
        { $_ -lt 7 } { $Fore = 'Yellow'; break }            
        { $_ -lt 12} { $Fore = 'Green'; break }            
        default { $Fore = 'Gray' }            
    }            
            
    Write-Host $DaysToSG -Fore $fore -NoNewline            
# and close the prompt in a way you want it to be closed, such as '> '            
    return ' > '            
}

As you can see mine is a bit different (that’s because I’m using Jaykuls prompt function) – but it tells me how much time left. I could use calendar for that too, but well… I prefer to see every day how this number decreases. The reason is simple – I can’t wait when the Scripting Games will start! 🙂

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