DSC3 Help and Feedback

[wekempf]

I'm new to DSC in general and I'm finding using DSC3 to be quite difficult. The documentation on Microsoft Learn is a decent start, but there's major gaps there. For instance, while I am on Windows and using PowerShell, the fact that the documentation entirely uses PowerShell to access the results of dsc seems very wrong for a "cross platform" tool. It also illustrates some shortcomings in the tool itself. To discover resources and how they are used requires a lot of finesse with the data returned. There really needs to be some sort of query mechanism built in to the tool. One would also hope that this would go beyond the data that's available today. For instance, I'm simply trying to figure out how to declare some PowerShell modules as desired state, and while I can get data that tells me to use the adapter Microsoft.Windows/WindowsPowerShell and the resource PowerShellGet/PSModule with known properties... there's no description for those properties, just a name. What's the type? What's the allowed values? What's the purpose?

Worse, while trying to figure all this out, the error messages produced are really, quite frankly, horrid.

2025-04-15T14:40:35.300549Z ERROR Not implemented: Custom resource not supported

This doesn't tell me anything. What does it think is a custom resource? Where in the configuration did it discover this problem? How would I go about fixing it?

2025-04-15T14:41:55.526155Z ERROR PID 4488: Exception: Resource PSModule was not found.
2025-04-15T14:41:55.556312Z ERROR Command: Resource 'powershell' [exit code 1] manifest description: Error

Really, who cares about the PID here? PID of what? I can make a guess, but this is information ONLY useful to the developers and maintainers of dsc. It's meaningless information to the users of dsc. I also have no idea why it can't find PSModule when this was found via dsc resource list -adapter *?

The output from dsc can be interpreted, but really, there should be a summary. With dsc test there's no indication of success or failure, and instead you have to interpret every bit of the data returned. All that data is useful, but it's not user friendly in the slightest.

The documentation lacks any sort of tutorial on setting up a real-world configuration file with common resources. Finding examples online is currently unsatisfactory, which is understandable given how new DSC3 is, but it really illustrates why the documentation needs this.

Does anyone know of any books on DSC3 that are planned? Anyone working on tutorials or other helpful documentation? Anyone have any real examples with complex configurations?