Showing archive results for April 2014

Desired State Configuration resources are used to model and change the state of different components of the system. In an earlier blog post, we discussed details about deploying and discovering those resources and introduced Import-DscResource dynamic keyword. In this post, we will discuss some more details about the usage and internal workin...

The DSC engine caches resources implemented as a PowerShell module for efficiency purposes. This can sometimes turn out to be annoying, when you are authoring a resource and testing it simultaneously. The only way to cause DSC to load the newer version every time is to explicitly kill the process hosting the DSC engine. As part of the WMF5 CTP rel...

 <Today we have a guest blog entry from Microsoft Customer Services & Support and the Garage>  Update: Version 1.1 of the Script Browser is out.  Check out the announcement here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/onescript/archive/2014/04/29/here-comes-the-update-of-script-browser-amp-script-analyzer-1-1.aspx To reuse script samples on the...

One question we often get around PowerShell Remoting is "How do I collect the output of remoting commands into a different file for each computer?" For example, you want to invoke a remote command across 1,000 machines as a multi-threaded job and then create 1,000 text files for their output. This is in fact impressively easy in PowerShe...

We’ve talked about this in the past but it’s time for a reminder.  PowerShell uses prefixes in front of nouns to avoid name collisions.  Imagine how many collisions there would be if people used the noun “USER” directly.  Instead, we have cmdlets *-ADUser, *-VPNUser, and *-RDUser.  The use of the prefix avoids name collisions.  When there is a ...

The Windows Management Framework V5 Preview is out! Check out Jeffrey Snover's announcement here. The preview contains updates to PowerShell Desired State Configuration, as well as two new features: NetworkSwitch cmdlets and Windows PowerShell OneGet.  OneGet is designed to dramatically simplify how you discover and install software packages, ...

Update 8/7/2014: We just published the Azure PowerShell DSC Extension, which simplifies the configuration of Azure VMs with PowerShell DSC. Please refer to this blog post for more information At the //build/ conference today, Jeffery Snover demonstrated bringing up an Azure virtual machine and configuring it using DSC and the Custom Script VM...