In the next chapter, we will delve into the details and inner workings of the DSC architecture. Before we do that, it will help to have an overview of the cmdlets and tools at your disposal when working with DSC. Some terms and concepts may be fuzzy here but will be explained in much more detail in further chapters. We can also use this section as a reference while authoring our own DSC configurations and resources.

PowerShell DSC is released as a feature of PowerShell, so its versioning scheme follows that of PowerShell. PowerShell is distributed as part of the WMF. When referring to the installed version of DSC, we use the version of PowerShell that is installed to denote which version of DSC it is currently running.

PowerShell V6, at the time of writing this, has not been released yet and is still in the alpha status, but we will still cover V4, V5, and V6 in this book. This will make things somewhat more complex to explain, as we will have to list, compare, contrast, and cover all the similarities and differences between the two versions as we move along. However, it is important to cover these because we fully expect you to have to deal with both PowerShell V4 and V5 deployed in your environments at the same time while looking at the future with V6. The final version of PowerShell V6 does not have a release date published yet, so realistically, you will have PowerShell V4 and V5 on your production systems for quite a while before moving to V6.