This was my second trip to Hannover for PsConf.EU, a 4 day conference covering every corner of PowerShell.

Sessions

Let’s start with the most important part of a conference, the content. Just a quick scan of the Agenda gave a hint of the quality lined up. With sessions from the PowerShell Dev team, and deep dives from community maestros there was plenty of highly technical content, but mixed up with some easier intros to new topics.

For me some of the highlights were getting a first view of some of the new features coming out from the DSC team for the LCM previews straight from the horse’s mouth (well, <a href=’https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/profile/Michael+Greene>Michael Greene the team leader), more details here. And the look at Pester internals from Jakub Jares (b | t) was good as well, now feel I know a lot more about the underpinning, and the reasons behind some of the ways you have to use it make much more sense.

No bad sessions from my point of view. A few issues with demos. Just from my point as a speaker, if you’re going to run a fragile multi machine demo, record a good version ahead of time. While it’s always good to do a demo live, with those setups once it’s gone wrong its’s very hard to recover.

The days run long, 08:30 – 20:00 on the wednesday with the 3 hour workshops at the end. For me this a bonus. When I’m at a conference I like to concentrate on the learning. Some conferences I’ve been to it’s felt as those you spend almost as much time at lunch or coffee breaks as you do in the sessions. So while there were long days it felt worth it.

The venue is well lit, the AV is great, even from the back of the room the screens were clear and the PA carrried the speaker right back. The rooms were closer together this year, and easier to navigate between. And despite the temperature being a step up from the UK the rooms were kept a pleasant but not overly cold temperature. Plenty of food and drink, the lunch menus weren’t holding anything back.

Community

I’m lucky enough to know quite a few PowerShell community members already, but met plenty more at PSConf.EU. Everyone’s there for the same reason so it was always easy to spark up a conversation with someone, whether sat next to them waiting for a session or in the queue for lunch. Was good to see the number of PS UserGroups that were teased out over a lunchtime breakout session, hopefully it’ll be up on the web shortly.

Party

Tuesday night was party night this year. Back to the Hannover Zoo for an evening of catching up and making new friends. The boat is pushed out with the venue, the demonstration from the Zoo (this year Polar Bear feeding), free food and beer. Don’t think anyone went hungry or thirsty that night.

Logistics

From the UK this is a pretty easy conference to get to. From Nottingham I took the train down to Heathrow, a 1 hour hop over with British Airways and a 20 minute train journey saw me in the centre of Hannover. Taxis are about ยข12 from the station to the Conference hotel, but as I’d spent a lot of time sitting down I decided to take the 25 minute walk across.

Accomodation

This year I stayed in the conference hotel the Congress Hotel Am StadtPark next door to the main conference venue. Good hotel, room was a decent size and had all the usual features. The bar was reasonably priced and usually full of PowerShell geeks if you wanted a chat over beers. Restaurant was good, but not cheap. The only downside was flaky WiFi, but that improved on Saturday once all the phones, tablets and laptops from the conference had left for some reason…..

Another great year from Tobias and his team. They’ve announced the dates for next year, 4th-7th June 2019 and they’ve been written into the calendar with ink as I’ll definitely be heading back.