PowerShell Team

Automating the world one-liner at a time…

Validate PowerShell DSC Partial Configurations

This post is part three of a blog series introduced in Validate the new features of PowerShell DSC. New Capability DSC now has the ability to merge partial configurations into one configuration for management. What is the purpose of this feature?Customers have told us that in some cases, multiple teams ...

Validate PowerShell DSC Node Status

This is part of a blog series first referenced here: Validate the new features of PowerShell DSCNew CapabilityA new cmdlet is available named Get-DscConfigurationStatus. This cmdlet returns detailed information about the status of a node.What is the purpose of this feature?Customers have told us that they need to be able to get ...

Validate features of PowerShell DSC

As many readers of the PowerShell blog already know, the next version of PowerShell is currently in preview. It is available in the Windows Management Framework 5 Preview. You can install this package on Windows 7, Server 2008 R2, or later.Your feedback is important to us!After software ships, it is harder to introduce changes. There is a ...

Use DSC to manage WMI namespace security

Almost 6 years ago, I wrote some PowerShell scripts in a multi-part series explaining WMI namespace security and also how to manage them using PowerShell. If you're not familiar with WMI namespace security, I recommend reading the blog posts above or even as a refresher.I received some feedback fairly recently about some issues and this ...

DSC Resource Kit flourishes as open source

We are excited to announce the recent updates which were made to DSC Resource Kit since open sourcing it on GitHub! We were working hard on improving coverage and robustness of DSC as well as saw incredible engagement from the community in the recent months. That effort resulted in adding 32 new DSC resources across 8 modules and fixing bugs ...

Want to write a DSC resource where only a single instance can be configured?

I've heard from a few DSC resource authors that they need a method to implement a resource that has a single instance; a singleton. The problem they encountered is a DSC resource must define a Key property but singleton resources generally should not have a key because there is only one instance that can be updated.The problem can been...

MSIgnite BRK4452 – Writing Windows PowerShell DSC Resources and Configurations

Recordings of  MS Ignite 2015 session BRK4452: Writing Windows PowerShell DSC Resources and Configurations are now available online.As mentioned in the session you can download the demo modules using the following code:  Find-Module -Tag BRK4452 -OutVariable Modules $Modules | % {Install-Module -Name $_.Name -...

PowerShell DSC for Linux is now available!

We are pleased to announce that PowerShell Desired State Configuration for Linux (version 1) is available for download. You can now use the powerful Desired State Configuration (DSC) platform to manage the configuration ofboth Windows and Linux workloads with a familiar PowerShell interface. Bringing DSC to Linux is another step in Microsoft&...

Desired State Configuration Resources for PackageManagement Providers

IntroductionYou may have heard of, or even already used PackageManagement (aka OneGet). Recently, I was reading the OneGet blog and OneGet in GitHub, and decided to give it a try by installing the Windows Management Framework (WMF) 5.0 Preview April 2015. I found that PackageManagement provides a consistent user experience by exposing the ...

DSC Resource Kit Moved to GitHub

We are proud to announce that the entire DSC Resource Kit has been open-sourced on GitHub. This means that we will be iterating and releasing these DSC resources quicker than ever before. It also means that we will be collaborating more openly with the community by accepting GitHub pull requests into our code. For those of you ...