Authoring Enhancements in Microsoft Desired State Configuration v3.0.0

This is the third post in a multi-part series about the new release of DSC.

Microsoft Desired State Configuration (DSC) v3.0.0 provides powerful feature that enhance the authoring experience.

• Shell completion
• Schema-based validation
• Support for modern DSLs like Azure Bicep

DSC command completer

The completer command returns a shell script that, when executed, registers completions for the
given shell.

DSC can generate completion scripts for the following shells:

• Bash
• Elvish
• Fish
• PowerShell
• Z Shell

To learn more, see the dsc completer command reference documentation.

Enhanced Authoring with Schemas

Working with DSC platform involves writing configuration documents and resource manifests. DSC
validates these data files using a JSON schema. While the DSC schemas are useful for authoring, DSC
also includes a set of enhanced schemas for authoring the files in VS Code.

These schemas define extra keywords specific to VS Code that:

• Improve the contextual help when hovering on or selecting a property in the data file.
• Add contextual help for enum values.
• Improve the error messages for invalid values.
• Add default snippets to autocomplete values.

To learn more, see Authoring with Enhanced Schemas.

Authoring with Bicep (Coming soon!)

Bicep is Microsoft’s domain specific language (DSL) for creating declarative Azure Resource
Manager (ARM) deployments. It offers a clean, intuitive syntax that makes writing and maintaining
DSC configurations more efficient. By using Bicep as a DSL, DSC users enjoy the benefits of strong
validation, modularity, and seamless integration with Azure-native tooling, without the complexity
of authoring in JSON or YAML.

You can write and invoke Bicep configurations locally–without access to Azure–or as part of
your Azure deployments, combining Infrastructure as code (IaC) and Configuration as code (CaC).

The following Bicep configuration document calls the classic PowerShell resource WindowsFeature
from the PSDesiredStateConfiguration module to install the IIS web server feature on Windows
Server.

targetScope = 'dsc'
resource powershellAdapter 'Microsoft.Windows/WindowsPowerShell@2025-01-07' = {
  name: 'Web server install'
  properties: {
    resources: [
      {
        name: 'Run WindowsFeature'
        type: 'PSDesiredStateConfiguration/WindowsFeature'
        properties: {
          Name: 'Web-server'
          Ensure: 'Present'
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

By default, a Bicep file is scoped to a Bicep resource. To use Bicep with DSC, you must set the
scope to dsc. Bicep support is still being developed. We’ll make an announcement when Bicep
support and documentation is available.

Call to action

For more information about DSC v3.0, see the DSCv3 documentation. We value your feedback. Stop
by our GitHub repository and let us know of any issues you find.

Jason Helmick

Sr. Product Manager, PowerShell

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