When crafting your DSC configuration script and DSC configuration data files, there are a few variables you will use that are predefined and special. These variables are reserved in the sense that DSC will populate the variables with values you provide from your configuration data files at runtime. They provide special functions or features that you can use inside your configuration scripts.

Seeing what these variables look like will be helpful when reading these descriptions, so we will show an example to refer to for each variable as we move through them individually. We will see these example again in the Defining a DSC configuration data file section.