SharePointDsc v3.7 has been released on October 31st 2019 and unfortunately we have been a little quiet since then. Of course this had a reason, which we would like to share in this post.
Over the past months a lot of work has been done to make the DSC community better, releasing a website was one of these steps: https://dsccommunity.org/
Another major step was the decision to move all DSC modules under a new, dedicated GitHub organization: DSCCommunity. Early December all repositories were moved to this new organization, some of you might have noticed the new URL: https://github.com/dsccommunity/SharePointDsc
One major improvement that came with this move was a completely new CD/CI pipeline with which each module automatically releases preview versions of its module to the PowerShell Gallery. And whenever they need or want to, they can release a new version without any manual action of the PowerShell Product Group.
Even though this was a huge improvement, converting the existing AppVeyor based pipeline into the new Azure DevOps based pipeline was a big operation. But where other resources could keep running the AppVeyor pipeline while upgrading to the new pipeline, we ran into an issue:
Due to the large number of resources in SharePointDsc and the fact that we have to test against SharePoint 2013/2016/2019, running all unit tests takes longer than one hour. Shortly after the move, we discovered that unfortunately the free version of AppVeyor we were using in the DSCCommunity organization only allows tests to run for maximum one hour (the PowerShell org used a paid version). Major bummer!
That is why over the past months we have been working hard on implementing the new CD/CI pipeline. We only have a few last small steps to complete, after which we will release v3.8!! Besides that, we are also working on releasing v4.0 which contains a few breaking changes and adds SQL Authentication support. So definitely keep posted!
