When do you need the DSC Resource Kit?

DSC
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I get that I need it for the resrouces in there that are not builtin. My confusion comes in that many of the resources duplicate the stuff that is builtin. To be specific, I was trying to install Chrome using a pull server. I was following the article in from Day 21 on SystemCenterCentral. Basically it had me install the resource kit and then use the xPSDesiredStateConfiguration and xChrome resourse. It showed how to package the resource and put it on the pull server so it would download. I did that and it worked for xPSDesiredStateConfiguration but not for xChrome. Only one module was pulled no matter what I did so of course it failed (the article never mentioned that you needed to download xChrome to the target server but it the error messages were pretty clear) Finally I tried using Push instead of pull and then I got an error from MSF_XRemoteFile.

After pounding my head against the wall for a while, I tried to used just the Package resource. I found a utility to pull out the Product ID and viola – it installed via push quite cleanly. The configuration worked both with Pull and Push and I didn’t have to mess with copying custom resources. So what am I missing? Why are people going through the effort to duplicate what already exists?

Thanks

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I haven’t looked at xChrome, but I can share a similar story. I’ve recently put together a resource to deploy the Oracle JRE, and I started with a copy of xPackage out of the resource kit.

Why not just use Package or xPackage as-is? Because Oracle (and Sun before them) changes the product name AND the product ID of Java every time they release a patch, and unless you’re doing a “static” installation, java is probably being patched regularly (either through its own auto-updater, or some other process.) The JRE resource I wrote knows how to find all of Java’s product IDs and how to figure out the version that’s actually installed, so it can play well even with an auto-update installation.