Blog Post: Microsoft Scripting Guy Predictions for 2011

 

Summary: Microsoft Scripting Guy Ed Wilson makes predictions for the scripting world 2011.

 

Microsoft Scripting Guy Ed Wilson here. One of the cool things about a new year is that you have an entire year ahead of you. The potential opportunities are nearly unlimited. In the United States, this is the time of the year when bloggers, commentators, or experts in nearly every subject known to humankind take time out to make predictions about the year to come. Every subject, except one—no one has performed the crystal ball act for the world of scripting. While making saw dust in my woodshop this morning, I resolved to correct that oversight (unfortunately, I cannot go into NDA stuff so the predictions will be rather lame – more wishful thinking kinds of things).

I predict that someone in the community will write a Windows PowerShell module to facilitate interaction with the Microsoft Zune. This would allow someone to search the database for specific songs, add tags to the songs, and rearrange song categories.

I predict that someone in the community will write a Windows PowerShell module to facilitate interaction with Microsoft Office products. This would allow one to pipeline output to a Word document, or to an Excel spreadsheet.

I predict that someone in the community will write a Windows PowerShell provider to allow me to mount my Windows 7 smart phone like a file system drive. I could then use the dir command (Get-ChildItem) and search the contents of my phone. In addition, I could filter based upon criteria provided to the Where-Object cmdlet.

I predict that someone in the community will write a Windows PowerShell minishell that will run on my Windows 7 smart phone. I could then manage my network from my smart phone by running Windows PowerShell commands (instead of having to open an RDP session).

I have two other predictions that are really more like predictions. I predict that the 2011 Scripting Games (April 4 – April 15 2011) will have even more participants than the 2010 Scripting Games (even though I will not be offering a VBScript category this year).

I also predict that this year there will be more Windows PowerShell scripts submitted to the Scripting Guys Script Repository than VBScripts.

Of course, one of the fun things about New Year predictions is that by the end of the year, most people have completely forgotten what was predicted. I, on the other hand, have one more prediction … next year I will see how I did with the 2011 predictions.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter or Facebook. If you have any questions, send email to me at scripter@microsoft.com or post them on the Official Scripting Guys Forum. See you tomorrow. Until then, peace.

 

Ed Wilson, Microsoft Scripting Guy

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