Archive for July, 2009

If you were one of the two people who read my last post on WSS and PowerShell I updated it a bit and it’s worth checking out the changes.

I thought this time I would just point out some of the very simple statements in PowerShell that differ from your usual C# so that you can quickly make a transition from one to another.

One of the first things any programmer might need to do in a script is conditions so here is a PowerShell condition and how it differs to c#

if ($i -eq 10)
{
    write "It's ten you know"
}

The comparison operator for equals is not "=" or "==" but a scripting style operator of -eq. So this is the first thing you’re going to have to remember.  Other operators are

-gt greater than,  -lt less than,  -ge greater than or equal to,  -ne not equal

There are more I found a simple table of them here.

When dealing with boolean responses its important to know that they are represented by $true and $false so a condition to test this would look like

if ($kidding -eq $false) {

    write "How strange" }

Now being good little programmers you’re bound to want to structure your More >

The more I do with SharePoint the more and more I an finding a use for PowerShell. I am using WSS as an application platform and using lists etc as a datasource.  Providing what you want is not huge amounts of referential integrity and transactional control etc it works pretty well.

But when things go wrong, often the only way to quickly get in a fix something in a structured, repeatable and documented manner is PowerShell.  Hell and its fun too.

So as a Sharepointy person what do you need to learn to get you quickly started.

First go and install PowerShell, this is version 1 which is what I am using, version 2 will be great but is not in production yet, so try getting that on your live servers, if they let you, sack them – pre-release code on production servers pah!.

Next go and download Quest’s PowerGUI.  This comes with the fantastic script editor, that allows stepping through code and debugging, i tend to use this for all my PowerShell development, I’m used to Visual Studio so being confronted with a command shell environment can be a little daunting.

Now if you go looking on the web at powershell there are More >