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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.

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