Session 1

Getting Started with a DSC Pipeline

Gael Colas

The understanding of DSC as a technology is rarely enough to get started. DSC is a great tool for configuring servers, but out of the box, it might be hard to know where to start.

In order to avoid the ‘blank page syndrome’, we’ll discover how you can get started quickly by bootstrapping your pipeline.

This session will focus on the basic concepts of a pipeline for infrastructure, how it applies to DSC, and how to build the DSC Artefacts consistently to improve trust in those.

Ideally, if you bring your laptop and we get a network connection, you can try for yourself and follow along, it’s that easy!

The demo/code part will focus on creating re-usable components (DSC Composite Resources leveraging existing DSC Resources), and assembling them in roles to apply to nodes. This will allow us to compile MOFs for as many nodes as we need, along with Meta MOFs and Packaging modules for Pull server.

You don’t need any VM for this, only WMF 5.1 and your preferred IDE (i.e. ISE or VSCODE).

I prefer vscode as it allows editing Yaml and JSON files natively.

We won’t apply those MOFs or cover the PULL and PUSH models, as it was been mentioned by Iain in March’s session, and is not needed for this part anyway.

Click here for the slide deck

Session 2

Automating everything with Microsoft Flow

Microsoft Flow is a great workflow automation tool, but most likely PowerShell is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about Flow. In this session I will show how to integrate Microsoft Flow in PowerShell scripts and vice-versa and to highlight the benefits that this provide. This demo-heavy session will feature a lot of PowerShell code and live demos.

Click here for the slide deck

Schedule

19:00 - 19:30: Arrival, and welcome / User Group introduction
19:30 - 20:15: Getting Started with a DSC Pipeline
20:15 - 20:45: Break / Pizza / Refreshments
20:45 - 21:30: Automating everything with Microsoft Flow
21:30: Close up