Useful Resources to Teach Yourself PowerShell DSC

When learning about DSC you will likely read dozens of articles and try to make sense of them. I will give you a head start and point you to the most helpful articles that I have used in the past.

Also make sure that you come back to look through my posts about PowerShell Desired State Configuration.

Topics

Fundamentals

Meta Configurations

Node Configurations

Pull Server

Credentials

Debugging

Custom Resources

Features in WMF 5.0

Sites

Learning about DSC Resources

Fundamentals

Meta Configurations

Node Configurations

Pull Server

Mind that the current (Wave 8) implementation of the DSC resource for the pull server does not work on locales other than en_*. See my post Setting up a Desired State Configuration Pull Server with Non-English Locales.

Credentials

See my post about Handling Plain Text Credentials in PowerShell DSC

Debugging

Custom Resources

Features in WMF 5.0

Sites

In contrast to the posts above - which focus on a certain topic - Jacob Benson’s blog features many posts about his journey with Desired State Configuration. So instead of pointing to individual posts, you need to read through most of the posts. They contain a wealth of information about writing and deploying configurations.

Hans Vredevoort maintains the #WAPack Wiki which contains an extensive section about PowerShell DSC with numerous articles.

Learning about DSC Resources

Microsoft maintains a documentation of all DSC builtin resources shipped with Windows Server 2012 R2 and younger. Additional DSC resources are published in waves in TechNet Gallery.You can retrieve all available DSC resources with the following command:

Get-DscResource

The following command displays all properties for the registry resource:

Get-DscResource -Name Registry | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Properties
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