Channel 9’s MMS 2013 RSS feed is more fun with PowerShell

The MMS 2013 conference starts next week. The keynote and sessions will be available for replay through the Channel 9 web site. Channel 9 has unveiled their MMS 2013 page including an RSS feed. We can use the RSS feed and PowerShell to easily browse the session catalog.

The following command uses the Invoke-RestMethod cmdlet, introduced in Windows PowerShell 3.0, to get information from the MMS 2013 RSS feed. We select a few properties and pass them on to the Out-GridView cmdlet. In a grid view, we can perform further filtering (picking up only sessions where a summary contains the word “powershell”, for example), select the sessions we are interested in, and, thanks to a new -PassThru parameter, pipe them to the Export-Csv cmdlet.

PS> $rss = 'http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/RSS'
PS> Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $rss | select Title, Creator, Summary, Link | Out-GridView -PassThru | Export-Csv -Path c:\temp\mms2013.csv -Encoding UTF8

This is how the grid view looks like after filtering PowerShell-related sessions (click for larger image):

Now that we have our sessions exported to a CSV file, we can import the file, and look at the details of some specific session that we are interested in:

PS> Import-Csv c:\temp\mms2013.csv | where title -match 'azure' | fl *

title   : Take Control of the Cloud with the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets
creator : Michael Washam
summary : In this session you will learn how to tame the simplest to most advanced Windows Azure deployments with the Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets. Automate repetitive tasks and learn 
          how build advanced reproducible deployments so you can save time and money while working in the cloud. The presenter will cover dev-ops scenarios with Virtual Machines and Cloud 
          Services in this demo packed session.
link    : http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B311