SharePoint PowerShell

If you were at my PowerShell for developers talk at the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference last week then you’ll know that I’ve never been all that happy with how I was approaching Farm Solution deployment, as detailed in an earlier post from sometime last year (Deploying SharePoint 2010 Solution Packages Using PowerShell).

During my PowerShell for Developers presentation in London last week I promised to show and demonstrate a script for retrieving Feature activations; unfortunately I ran out of time and was not able to show this script to the degree that I’d intended so I decided to throw together this blog post.

I got an email today asking if I had anything that would generate a report detailing all the documents throughout an entire SharePoint Farm. As this wasn’t the first time I’ve been asked this same question I decided that I’d just go ahead and post the script for generating such a report.

I’ve talked on several occasions about how we can easily use the SharePoint 2010 object model (OM) to discover who has access to a securable object (SPWeb, SPList, or SPListItem) and the fact that we can use the same mechanisms within PowerShell to create useful security/audit reports.

It’s been a while since my last real SharePoint 2010 scripting post but we’re getting close to RTM so I figured I need to buckle down and play some catch up and get some long overdue posts published.

The information in this post is specific to SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 and may need adjusting for the RTM version. In an effort to continue with my previous posts where I demonstrated how to build a basic farm and it’s site structure using XML configuration files and PowerShell for SharePoint 2010 I would like to now share how to create a search service application.

In a previous post I detailed how to use PowerShell to perform what would be otherwise done using PSConfig to create an initial SharePoint Farm. In this post I will continue the example and show how to create your web applications using a simple XML configuration file and a reusable script.

The information in this article is based on BETA 2 of SharePoint 2010 – there may be differences with the RTM release. Update 12/18/2009: I’ve updated the post to reflect BETA 2 changes and have considerably simplified the script removing all the dependencies on helper functions so that the core pieces required to build a basic farm are focused on rather than the complex elements to support tracing and error handling as I previously had it.

The information in this article is based on BETA 2 of SharePoint 2010 – there will likely be differences with the RTM release.` Finally, the NDA is lifted and we can openly talk about SharePoint 2010!

While looking through the event logs at a client of mine the other day I came across an odd error that was occurring regularly. Apparently they had developed a Feature which contained an Event Receiver which was programmatically bound to a series of lists.