Jason Helmick and I were recently up in Redmond recording a Microsoft Virtual Academy series entitled, “Building Your Datacenter One DSC Resource at a Time.” While we were there, we decided to film a tongue-in-cheek promo for the series that started with the premise that, “if you haven’t already learned PowerShell, you missed the bus.” Obviously, there’s a bit more to the story.

First, watch the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuzFUI5Id0g …

Second, notice that _we specifically encourage people to learn DSC. _Hmm… are there any pre-requisite technologies for learning DSC?

Maybe, learning PowerShell ?

We were really speaking to the folks who’ve been procrastinating on PowerShell for the past half-decade or more, because we really do believe that DSC is a great, and often easier, way to actually learn PowerShell. Sometimes, PowerShell is tough to get into simply because you don’t have a task to tackle. DSC gives you one - a practical application of PowerShell that lets you dive in from a different angle.

_Obviously, _we think learning PowerShell is important, _or we wouldn’t have built our careers around the technology. _But we know it can be tough to get started in - and every year that passes makes it harder to get started, as new features are added. But DSC represents a bit of a fresh start, and an opportunity to get into PowerShell on the ground floor, from a somewhat different direction.

Some folks got really ticked when we basically said, “if you haven’t started learning PowerShell by now, then it’s too late,” but seemed to miss the massive encouragement we gave for learning DSC. 

And no, we don’t really think that it’s too late to start in PowerShell if you haven’t, already. I’m forever reminding people that there’s this thing called a “birth rate” in the world, which means there’ll always be new people coming into the industry and starting from scratch. I’ve spent a massive amount of effort producing materials to help those newcomers, and I certainly don’t think that “entry level” just stopped in 2015!

But… if you’ve been putting it off, maybe take a new look at PowerShell from the DSC perspective. It’s different, I promise - and it’s not at all like programming as you get started. It’s a neat way to leverage, and kind of abstract, the massive investment that’s been made in PowerShell since 2006, and might be just the thing to win you over to the Shell Side.