Last year I took part in PowerShell Community Konferenz that took place in Essen/ Ruhr and was total blast. The only issue I had with last year event was the fact that my German is… as good as my Dutch. So unless German session was full of demos and code – I was not able to follow it. Fortunately, most of the sessions were actually of the kind I could follow even if they were presented in languages I hadn’t heard in my life. I can read code, even if variables may seem obfuscated. Apart from that there was very nice line-up of people who presented in English, including super-stars of my PowerShell world like Aleksandar Nikolić or Bruce Payette.
This year I’m going back to Germany to present at newest entity on the map of PowerShell events. Scheduled for April in Hannover, PowerShell Conference EU will most likely be bigger, better and for the most part (with exception of one of the tracks) English version of the event that I took part in last year. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still tempted to see some German sessions (knowing presenters from last year, I’m expecting to be flooded with code), but having more options should be a good thing (however I can see how that can become a bad thing when presenting in the empty room… 
).
What topics do I plan to cover this year? I sent organizers very long list and they’ve chosen two items on that list.
First one is directly related to my current project at work. We are trying to get DSC to do some hard work for us and while looking at shortcomings in its current version my work colleague suggested to use Octopus to fill in the gaps. He pushed this idea and it looks like we are going to use it in our environment. My session “PowerShell DSC and Octopus: better together” is going to explain how and why these two work hand in hand to get code flying around.
Second is just a side effect of my love-hate relationship with XML. I know that XML is my friend. “XML is your friend” too, so that’s how I titled my session. On the other hand: I often find myself and others wondering: why it has to be that hard? In this session I plan to show some tools, tips and tricks that should make life of anybody forced to use XML bit easier.
But presenting this year will be just tiny part of fun I expect: with line-up like the one you can see on agenda, you kind of expect great content. I’m looking forward to few sessions there and I hope I won’t be disappointed. And I would like to encourage you to give it a try too! It’s not free event, but I believe it’s well worth the money you have to pay for it. And if you can convince your company to pay it – even better. I’m pretty sure your company will benefit from it too. The scope of the sessions is so broad, that any IT person should find something useful in it! 
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