I’m so excited for 2012, personally and professionally.  I started the year with a great honor, I was awarded a Microsoft MVP award for PowerShell.

Just a bit of background… 

I started in IT in 2006 as the IT guy for a municipal police department.  It was the first such full time position the department had.  I immediately became responsible for a public safety network that needed to be operational 24/7.  This required me to deal with a lot of intermittent issues or requests and I quickly saw that I needed some tools to get my job done well.

I looked around and found out that the *NIX guys had it pretty well covered with shell scripting, Perl, Python, TCL, sed, awk, etc..  I went looking for the Microsoft equivalent.  I found Python and started doing some scripting with that.  I loved the syntax and structure, as well as the availability of an interactive interpreter.  The biggest pain was in dealing with the COM layer interactions.  I explored C# and began to dabble with that as well.

And then I found PowerShell.  I’ve been a PowerShell fanatic since the day I discovered it.  It was a shell language.  It had a scripting capability.  I could extend it with .NET and C#.  It worked with WMI and COM in a much more interactive manner and I didn’t have to go through some of the hoops that I had to with Python.  It was also a Microsoft product (and eventually was available through Windows Update or with newer OSes in the box), which made it easier to deploy (policy-wise and distribution-wise).

Since that point in early 2006, I have been pushing PowerShell to help in all of the varied environments I’ve found myself in.  I’ve become a speaker and a trainer and love sharing the capabilities of PowerShell and seeing others find value and make their work easier (or even possible).

This wouldn’t have been possible without…

I never would have been awarded this without the ceaseless lobbying of Doug Finke and the great interactions I’ve had with various members of the PowerShell team.  I know a number of other PowerShell MVPs also were vocal in nominating me (forgive me if I forgot anyone), including Shay Levy, Marco Shaw, Aleksandar Nikolic, and Ravikanth Chaganti.  I also had some great support from some of the Clustering MVPs (like Mike Steineke) and team (thanks Rob).  Last, but not least, I’ve had great support from my local DPE team.  Our local Developer Evangelist, Clark Sell, has never stopped encouraging me in spreading my thoughts on PowerShell and the development of a unified management API to .NET developer groups in our region (and further via his podcast).  Our local IT Pro Evangelist, Brian Lewis, has been a stalwart supporter of both user groups we have going in the Milwaukee area, the Greater Milwaukee Script Club and the Greater Milwaukee IT Pro User Community.

Finally,

I want to thank you, the readers of my blog, the attendees of my script club or IT Pro user group, and any of the various attendees of talks I have given.  Thank you for allowing me to share a bit of my experience and thoughts with you and I can’t wait to see where this year goes (PowerShell V3 is on the horizon!!!).