The PowerShell team has just released an update to the DSC resource kit – bringing the total number of DSC resources to over 80! While the bulk of the resources in the resource kit are ‘experimental’ – they seem to me to be very stable (continuing the PowerShell team’s ability to ship rich, useful, and reliable beta code).
And even better, the PowerShell team seem to have gone back to their old roots in terms of time to market. They appear to be releasing as they develop (and long may this continue). Thus, the new SafeHarbor DSC resource, this was finished after Wave 5 was released but before Wave 6 was ready so the PowerShell team published it separately, then publish it (with updates and bug fixes) a few weeks later in the Wave 6 drop. I can’t tell you how good this feels after so long under the cone of silence.
This latest drop has some very interesting resources, including the xChrome and xFirefox resources that help to deploy these two browsers. The Group resource shipped with PowerShell 4 is updated to provide support for cross-domain account lookups as well as for UPN-formatted names. The new xRemoteDesktopAdmin resource enables. Additionally, Wave 6 has a number of bug fixes to earlier waves. Again – the ability to get these fixes quickly is both useful and much appreciated.
The DSC story is slowly coming clearer with both the July drop and these continuingly improving resources. And with Chef integrating with DSC, DSC’s future looks very rosy. If you are looking to find out a bit more about DSC – I’ll be covering the basics on the PowerShell PowerCamp event in October.
