As most of the technology world knows (and even the general public thanks to commercials like the one below… who doesn’t love unicorns, kittens and rainbows) Windows 7 is releasing to the public on Oct 22, 2009.  Normally this would get me very excited except that I’ve been running Windows 7 RTM as the primary boot on my home desktop and as the secondary boot on my work laptop for a few months now.  I didn’t get much chance to use Vista over the past few years (client workstations with XP, working more with servers, etc) so I’m taking a more concerted effort to jump into Windows 7 early on.  So far the experience has been great with only one major issue I had with IE8 (crashing due to plug-ins) which I’m writing another post about.

Despite the Windows 7 release this week, what really has me excited is the start of the SharePoint Conference 2009 today.  Sadly I am unable to attend the conference this year so I’ve been trying to follow news coming out of the conference through live blogging from EndUserSharePoint.com and Twitter tweeps.  One of the best pieces of news I heard confirmed one of my long held beliefs: STSADM is essentially being replaced by PowerShell (reference).  Now this isn’t to say that you can’t use STSADM going forward with SharePoint 2010.  STSADM will still be around for backwards compatibility, but you really do want to learn PowerShell if you’ll be working in any sort of developer or administrative role with SharePoint.

Speaking of SharePoint and PowerShell, I just received word today that I was accepted to speak at SharePoint Saturday Cleveland coming up on Nov. 14th, 2009.  My presentation is titled “The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint” and it will be half introduction to PowerShell and half overview of how admins/developers can use PowerShell to maintain and develop against their farm.  I’ve been using PowerShell to help me with SharePoint for over a year now and I’m very happy to see that PowerShell is taking such a prominent place amongst tools for SharePoint.  So if you’re free on the Sat Nov 14th and can make it to the Cleveland area come see me talk, the event is free.  Registration and schedules should be posted shortly to the link above.  I’ll post my slides and code samples to my blog for those unable to attend or wishing to try out samples as well.

-Frog Out