So I was hunting round on the web the other day, trying to find a DSC resource which can create and manage Scheduled Tasks on Windows Server 2012. Unfortunately, my searching came up blank. There seemed to be no way of easily managing Scheduled Tasks and Jobs using Desired State Configuration.

So I wrote one.

ScheduledTaskDSC is a public project on GitHub. At the moment, it contains one resource, xScheduledTaskDSC, which can create simple Task Scheduler items, detect and correct configuration drift* and remove unwanted tasks.

At the moment, it’s just good enough for my use case (which is creating simple tasks on transient cloud instances via Octopus Deploy), but I want to expand it significantly to support more scenarios, and maybe add resources for Actions and Triggers, allowing for more complex task creation and management, as well as finishing off some Pester tests on it. But that’s for the future.

For now, feel free to take a look, have a play around with it, suggest or write improvements and send me pull requests. All PRs are considered. Have at it, kids.

 

* drift correction is limited at the time of writing. It detects a subset of drift, and will simply kill broken tasks and recreate them with correct parameters. I’m currently working on more subtle drift correction.

Note: 7 Feb 2016: Carbon includes a Scheduled Task DSC resource, however you need to pass in a chunk of XML. I have been a bit vocal about XML in the past, but Carbon may well do the job for you if you have an XML chunk from, say, schtasks.exe.