The DSC V3 Handbook
The DSC V3 Handbook
About the Book
Whenever you think of Desired State Configuration (DSC), you think of Windows systems and bring them to the desired state they should be when defined from a configuration. However, DSC version 3 threw a whole different ballgame and expanded significantly to become cross-platform, after the class-based DSC resources were decoupled from Windows, supporting Linux-based systems.
In this extensive handbook, you will learn about the philosophy and rise of ideas from the core PowerShell DSC members and community. There's also a whole different set of terminologies to explore, as the core engine has been written in Rust. The book covers this in more depth, touches upon new operations, such as `Export` or `Delete`, and explains how you can get started building command-based DSC resources. In the last chapter, advanced concepts are taught, covering the adapter lookup table for adapted resources, migration from DSC v1/v2 Configuration Documents, and how DSC v3 has implemented localization.
DSC is no longer a PowerShell cmdlet, but rather an executable for various platforms. You can now easily run it on your macOS, Windows, or Linux machine. This handbook will use Windows as the primary system.
Is this book for you?
This book is intended for system administrators, DevOps engineers, and developers who manage large-scale, cross-platform systems. Yes, you heard that right. All these roles can make use of this book, even though you don't have to manage these systems. Instead, developers can assist system administrators or DevOps engineers by writing tools in different languages other than PowerShell, which in turn can hook into DSC's core engine. You will learn all about it in this book!
Agile-published book
DSC v3 is going at a rapid pace. In March 2025, the official General Availability (GA) was announced on the official Microsoft site. Shortly after, in June, v3.1 was released. That's why this book is published in an Agile fashion, allowing me to incrementally update the book as DSC is evolving. If you purchase the book once, you'll get these updates whenever they're made. You'll receive notifications with release notes if you've opted in to this feature.
About the Author
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Who is this book for?
- Code listings and typographic conventions
- What you need for this book
- Feedback
- Version information
- About the author
- Chapter 1 - Desired state is $true or $false
- Your development environment
- Downloading and installing DSC
- Downloading and installing Visual Studio Code with extensions
- Set up authoring experience
- The beginning of DSC version 3
- Define manifest over configuration
- No more MOF
- Bring your agent
- Executing DSC resources
- Get-Help
- Summary
- Your development environment
- Chapter 2 - The DSC Language
- Exploring new terminology
- Understanding DSC type namespaces
- Discovering resources using resource manifests
- Exploring command-based resources
- Schema integration and input
- Formatting
- Logging messages
- Progressive messages
- What-if support
- Summary
- Exploring new terminology
- Chapter 3 - Exploring DSC Capabilities and Commands
- How assertions drive logic
- Using ARM template functionality in configuration documents
- Deep dive into adapters
- Exporting resources
- Grouping, includes and parallelism
- DSC Meta settings
- Summary
- Chapter 4 - Building Command-Based DSC resources using .NET and Python
- Approach 1: Building from scratch with .NET
- Set up your development environment for .NET
- Implement config get command
- Implement config set command
- Generate schema command
- Create build automation script
- The resource manifest
- Validate commands using Pester
- Approach 2: Using OpenDsc library
- Installing OpenDsc.Templates
- Defining properties
- Implementing the config get command
- Implementing the config set command
- Implementing the config delete command
- Implementing the export capability
- Defining exit codes
- Approach 3: Create Windows resource with Python
- Set up Python development environment
- Define the command structure
- Define helper functions
- Implement the get capability
- Implement the set capability
- Implement the delete capability
- Update the main application
- Test the get capability
- Test the set capability
- Test the delete capability
- Summary
- Approach 1: Building from scratch with .NET
- Chapter 5 - Advanced Concepts
- Ensure or _exist
- Migrating existing configuration documents
- Deep dive into export operation
- The adapter lookup table
- Localize messages
- Author configuration documents using Bicep
- Discovering Windows Apps
- PowerShell adapters credentials support
- How does credential support works
- The extensable secret extension
- Using Windows Credential Manager
- Using Azure Key Vault
- Summary
- A glimpse into the future
- Other tooling to improve authoring configurations
- Machine Configuration collaboration
- Resource discovery and publishing
- Release notes
- Preface
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