SharePoint 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.