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Wednesday, April 15
 

12:30pm PDT

DSC v3: Evolving Declarative Configuration for Modern Systems
Wednesday April 15, 2026 12:30pm - 1:15pm PDT
DSC v3 continues its evolutionary path, expanding into a more flexible, predictable, and approachable declarative configuration platform. Over the past year, the team has delivered substantial enhancements across the execution engine, resource model, and authoring experience. Configuration authoring is clearer and more consistent, schemas are richer and easier to validate, and new resource adapters make it simpler to integrate existing tools and ecosystems without rewriting everything from scratch.
 
This session highlights what’s new and what’s practical: writing and composing configurations, building custom resources, using adapters, and working with the latest export and testing capabilities. The focus is on real scenarios, repeatable patterns, and the forward direction of DSC v3 as it becomes an essential, lightweight foundation for configuration management across platforms. Join us for demos, discussion, and a look at what’s next.
Speakers
avatar for Steve Lee

Steve Lee

Principal Software Engineer Manager, Microsoft
avatar for Jason Helmick

Jason Helmick

Sr. Product Manager, Microsoft
Wednesday April 15, 2026 12:30pm - 1:15pm PDT
Meydenbauer Center - Room 405 11100 NE 6th St, Bellevue, WA 98004, USA

12:30pm PDT

Source Control for Chocolatey Packages: Because Future You Deserves Answers
Wednesday April 15, 2026 12:30pm - 1:15pm PDT
Chocolatey packaging is often learned by example—and sometimes by accident. When packaging code lives outside of source control, teams lose context, history, and confidence.

In this session, we’ll break down why Chocolatey packages should be treated as versioned code and how even simple Git usage dramatically improves reliability and maintainability. We’ll cover common beginner mistakes, a sensible repository structure, and how source control enables safer changes and easier automation. Whether you manage one package or many, this talk will help you build packaging workflows that won’t surprise future you.
Speakers
avatar for Stephen Valdinger

Stephen Valdinger

Customer Solutions Manager, Chocolatey Software
A few decades of IT and a ton of PowerShell experience later, I've seen a lot. Some great, some bad, some REALLY great, and some REALLY bad. Some of it has even been my fault.
Wednesday April 15, 2026 12:30pm - 1:15pm PDT
Meydenbauer Center - Room 407 11100 Northeast 6th Street, Bellevue, WA, USA

1:30pm PDT

Automating Packer Images with PowerShell
Wednesday April 15, 2026 1:30pm - 2:15pm PDT
Let’s roll up our sleeves and explore how to streamline the provisioning of virtual machine or container images.

Packer is a great tool that enables us to streamline the process of creating these images across many platforms. In this session, we will take a look at how we can utilize PowerShell to improve the flexibilty and scalability of your Packer workflows and templates.

Speakers
avatar for Matt McElreath

Matt McElreath

Solution Architect, FM Group
Passion for all things automation!
Wednesday April 15, 2026 1:30pm - 2:15pm PDT
Meydenbauer Center - Room 407 11100 Northeast 6th Street, Bellevue, WA, USA

1:30pm PDT

Foolproofing the Final Mile: Say Goodbye to the Messy Handoff Between Packaging and Deployment
Wednesday April 15, 2026 1:30pm - 2:15pm PDT
Sure, you can package anything, but, as you know, we believe strongly that you shouldn't have to package everything, especially not over and over again. In this session David James and Dan Gough will show off a new integration we're really proud of with Patch My PC and Master Packager.

Between our curated catalog will get you 90-99% patched, with no extra effort on your end, but for those special, complex situations when you need really a custom scripted solution, many of you rely on PSADT (We love it too). Then, challenges arise with what happens after you've packaged those apps, when deployment becomes clunky, versioning chaotic, and your environment becomes a dusty little script museum.

We believe even your most complicated PSADT-packaged apps deserve the same elegant systems as the rest of your apps. Enter: Master Packager. This integration helps you break the glass on those rare custom-scripted packages that just don't play nice. This integration converts otherwise difficult packages into PSADT apps (which work flawlessly with Patch My PC) and makes deployment with Intune seamless, just like your run-of-the-mill Chrome updates.

So pull up a chair and check out this session to see the system in action.
Speakers
avatar for David James

David James

Vice President of Engineering, Patch My PC
David James is the CTO and VP of Engineering at Patch My PC. He was previously the Director of Engineering at Microsoft for ConfigMgr. A short bio stolen from another site:

Studied Computer Engineering and Music Theory/Composition at University of Utah. Joined Microsoft in 1999 to work on SMS Installer, and eventually SMS 2.0 SP2.Has worked on every version of SMS/SCCM since.Was an engineering manager in Intune, 2012-2015.Outside of work, likes to c... Read More →
avatar for Dan Gough

Dan Gough

Software Engineer, Patch My PC
Dan is a software engineer in the catalog team at Patch My PC, mainly dealing with PowerShell automation, PSAppDeployToolkit development and debugging troublesome installers! In a previous life he was an application packager and a former Microsoft MVP for App-V.
Wednesday April 15, 2026 1:30pm - 2:15pm PDT
Meydenbauer Center - Room 406 11100 NE 6th St, Bellevue, WA 98004, USA

2:45pm PDT

Full Spectrum Terraform — Choosing and Combining Azure Providers Like a Pro
Wednesday April 15, 2026 2:45pm - 3:30pm PDT
Choosing the right Terraform provider for Azure shouldn't require a trade-off between coverage, stability, and speed-to-market. In this session, we break down how AzureRM and AzAPI work together to give you complete Azure resource coverage—combining the polish of a curated provider with the day-zero agility of a thin API layer. We'll then do the same for identity: showing how AzureAD and the new MSGraph provider converge to cover the full spectrum of Entra ID and Microsoft 365 scenarios. In the second half, we'll open the hood and walk you through a real contributor workflow—from identifying a gap, to writing and testing a contribution, to getting it merged—so you can see firsthand how approachable it is to help shape the providers you depend on. Come ready to ask questions and, if you're feeling ambitious, to submit your first PR.
Speakers
avatar for Steven Ma

Steven Ma

Program Manager, Terraform for Azure, Microsoft
Steven is a PM on the Terraform team for Azure, focusing on the Azure support for Terraform and the overall experience for Terraform users in Azure.
avatar for Mark Gray

Mark Gray

Principal Product Manager, Microsoft
Wednesday April 15, 2026 2:45pm - 3:30pm PDT
Meydenbauer Center - Room 405 11100 NE 6th St, Bellevue, WA 98004, USA

2:45pm PDT

Stop clicking and start committing: a GitOps workflow for endpoint management
Wednesday April 15, 2026 2:45pm - 3:30pm PDT
Every other discipline in IT figured this out years ago. Infrastructure, networking, application deployment — all moved to configuration as code because the scale forced them to. Endpoint management mostly didn't get the memo. We're still clicking through web interfaces, making changes one setting at a time, hoping we'll remember what we did when something breaks three months from now. That's not efficiency. That's invisible technical debt we've been pretending doesn't exist.

This talk is the case for moving your MDM into a Git repository — and a live demonstration of what that actually looks like. We'll cover why endpoint management got stuck in ClickOps while the rest of IT moved on, what config-as-code buys you that a GUI never can (history, diffs, code review, easy rollbacks), and how AI coding tools turn the slow part of this workflow into the fast part without removing the human review that keeps it safe. Includes a working sandbox-to-production pipeline with fleetctl and GitHub Actions.

I'm a Mac admin at a PowerShell conference, which I realize is a setup for a joke. It's also the point: the methodology has nothing to do with which OS you manage. Bring your objections — "git is too hard," "our team isn't ready," "the tools don't support it" — and I'll answer them.
Speakers
avatar for Kitzy

Kitzy

Customer Solutions Architect, FleetDM
Wednesday April 15, 2026 2:45pm - 3:30pm PDT
Meydenbauer Center - Room 406 11100 NE 6th St, Bellevue, WA 98004, USA
 
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