Use-PowerShell | Enter-Contest | Receive-Prize

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines!  The 3rd annual PowerGUI® Challenge is about to begin!

That’s right, this year Quest Software is sponsoring yet another PowerShell contest that gives you a chance to win some money by having fun with PowerShell and PowerGUI.  I’m totally excited about the contest this year, because there are more prizes, more categories, more judges, and more possibilities with what you can do than ever before!  If any of your entries make it into the top 10 in the two main categories (PowerPacks and Add-ons), they will be put in front of our incredible panel of celebrity judges for review and suggestions.  Judges this year include Jeffrey Snover, Hemant Mahawar, Don Jones, Jeffery Hicks, Shay Levy, Brandon Shell, Aleksandar Nikolic, and Marco Shaw.  If you’ve read even a little bit about PowerShell on the web, I’m sure a few of those names ring a bell.  Dmitry and I will review the entries and offer our own feedback as well.

Sound interesting?  Here’s what you should do:

1. Head on over to the PowerGUI Challenge contest page and read all of the details about the contest, paying close attention to the tips and the resources that are listed there to help you out.
2. If you’re not familiar with them already, take a look at the kinds of things you can do with PowerPacks and Add-ons by visiting the PowerPack Library and the Add-ons Library and trying some of them out (and make sure you install the Authoring Toolkit Add-on if you plan on creating Add-ons yourself – it’s a real time-saver).
3. Enter the contest!  The only way to make sure you don’t win anything is by not trying at all, and this is a really fun way to discover some of the cool things that you can do with PowerShell beyond regular scripting.

The contest runs from October 15 to November 15, so you have a lot of time to get yourself warmed up before the official start date, and then you can start adding your entries and getting community feedback.  Don’t wait, start learning more about what you can do by experimenting now!

In the meantime, I’ll be providing additional resources to help you out that I’ll announce on my blog as well, so keep your eyes open for more useful contest resources.

As always, don’t hesitate to ask questions if you have any.  As Alan Renouf (one of our winners in last year’s contest) knows, I’m more than happy to provide feedback and answer questions.

Happy scripting!

Kirk out.