MOSS

Deploying Multiple WSP Files Using Powershell

MOSSLover — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:31:15 GMT

I was playing around with some scripts today while I was working on an upgrade. I didn’t want to individually write out the names of files in a batch file and I wanted to create a quick Powershell Script. If you are using SharePoint 2010 you can use these lines of code in the Powershell Manager to deploy only .wsp files to your SharePoint 2010 Web Applications:

$dir = [directory]

$list = Get-ChildItem $dir | where {$_.extension -eq ".wsp"}

foreach($my_file in Get-ChildItem $list){Add-SPSolution -LiteralPath $my_file.FullName}

foreach($my_file in Get-ChildItem $list){Install-SPSolution -Identity $my_file.Name -AllWebApplications -GACDeployment}

Basically, you throw in the directory into a variable, then you throw the files into a variable in Powershell filtered by .wsp. Then you loop through the files and add the solutions to the store, then loop through the files and deploy them to the web applications. You can change the scripts accordingly. I figured this would be something you all could use so enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Powershell,SharePoint 2010,Deploying Multiple Solutions

Dude, where is my list instance?

MOSSLover — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:00:39 GMT

I saw an MSDN Forum post today, so I looked for a ListInstance Hidden property in SharePoint 2007 features. There is none, but interestingly enough there is one in 2010. I wondered what would happen if you did this:

It hides the entire list from SharePoint Designer and the browser, however you can hit the list by typing in the url in internet explorer. Pretty cool stuff. Enjoy guys.

Technorati Tags: Feature,List Instance,SharePoint 2010

More Changes...

MOSSLover — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 05:18:37 GMT

Stuff has changed drastically for me in the past two to three years. I moved over 1000 miles from Saint Louis. I go outside and I get up in front of crowds with less issues. Now I'm changing jobs again. I'm not really sure what to say here. I was obviously unhappy and I needed to do something different. So quit two days ago and I guess it worked out that I end with B&R this Friday, then head to TEC and SPS Huntsville and a week from this Monday I start my new job at Gig Werks. I'm not sure what to expect or where I'm heading, but I think it's a step in the right direction. I won't really know what kind of impact this will have on my life for at least another 6 months to a year.

For some reason I can't sleep tonight and I think it's really a reflection of my last day. Tomorrow is an ending and a beginning at the same time. So it's both kind of sad and exciting. I don't know why I'm really excited to go to Disney Land for the second time ever in my life time. I get to ride the Teacups. For the longest time when I was a kid I wanted to go to Disney Land. I wanted to ride the teacups. In 2007, at the age of 25, I rode the teacups for my first ever visit to LA. That was the start of finally syncing up with my childhood goals. I wanted to live near a major city. I wanted to visit all the major cities in the world. I wanted to see everything and meet everyone. This job change will probably turn into something great I just don't know it yet. I'm walking again outside my comfort zone and stepping into uncharted territory. In 2-3 years I'll probably write another blog post how this week lead to something great. It just stinks when you have to leave behind something you know and love. I will miss all my current colleagues, but I'm sure I'll gain some new ones and keep in touch with the old. To 2010 being a great year for change and hopefully by the end of the year I can say I went to Europe. To reaching my goals and my dreams. Don't let anyone stop you from getting what you want in life (unless you are axe murderer please don't kill anyone that's just wrong). Have a good weekend everyone!

SPRoleAssignment Crazy Caveats

MOSSLover — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:11:14 GMT

I’m not sure if this bug exists on any other environment, but here are a few issues I ran into when trying to use SPRoleAssignment and SPGroup:

When trying to use Web.Groups[“GroupName”] it basically told me the group did not exist, so I had to change the code to use Web.SiteGroups[“GroupName”].
I could not add the Role Assignment to the Web and run a Web.Update() without adding an additional Web.AllowUnsafeUpdates= true; , however on my virtual machine I could do a Web.Update() without the extra piece of code. I kept receiving an error in my browser stating that I should hit the back button and update my permissions.

So after fixing those two issues I was able to copy the permissions from a page item into a Site for my migration. Hopefully, one of you can learn from my error messages if you have any issues in the future.

Technorati Tags: SPRoleAssignment,MOSS,SPGroup

Upcoming Presentations

MOSSLover — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 19:07:33 GMT

Conferences:

SSWUG.org VConference, 4 sessions, April 7,8, and 9, Register at http://www.vconferenceonline.com/shows/spring10/uvc/
SharePoint .org Conference, 2 sessions, April 18-21, http://www.sharepointconference.org/Pages/default.aspx
The Expert's Conference, Silverlight, April 25-28, enter the code "Gambit" when you register at: http://www.theexpertsconference.com/general-information/sharepoint-training/
SharePoint Saturdays:
SharePoint Saturday Charlotte, Silverlight, April 10th, Regiser at http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/charlotte
Code Camps:
New York City Code Camp, March 6th, Register at http://ny.codecamp.us
User Groups:
TRISPUG, March 2nd, Register at http://www.trispug.com/default.aspx
Central NJ .Net User Group, March 11th, Register at http://www.njdotnet.net/

SharePoint Saturday Boston Slides and Code

MOSSLover — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:57:28 GMT

Here is a link to the slides and code samples on my Sky Drive: http://cid-8e2654c5f01e6069.skydrive.live.com/summary.aspx?sa=624379842
In the future I will be doing a bunch of Stickam test presentations. Check this blog for information and my twitter account. I need more practice and I think Stickam or some other sharing outlet would help a lot.

Migrating the Publishing Pages for Fun and Profit

MOSSLover — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:58:01 GMT

This week and the following weeks I will be working through a ton of recursive functions to move a rather hefty page library into a Site Collection and subwebs. I figure while I am having some “fun” you guys will profit will a few of my scripts. For any of you out there who are interested in how to create a publishing page in a library here is a little sample code on how to copy items from the page content area and create a new page then replace a welcome page. Here is a small sample:

PublishingSite PubSite = new PublishingSite(NewSite); //pass in an SPSite Object
PageLayoutCollection SiteLayouts = PubSite.GetPageLayouts(false);
PageLayout MyLayout = SiteLayous[“urlforlayout”];
PublishingWeb PubWeb = PublishingWeb.GetPublishingWeb(Web); //pass in an SPWeb Object
PublishingPageCollection Pages = PubWeb.GetPublishingPages();
PublishingPage MyPage = PubWeb.GetPublishingPages().Add(ChildItem["Name"].ToString(), MyLayout);
MyPage.ListItem["Page Content"] = ChildItem["Page Content"];
MyPage.ListItem.Update();
MyPage.Update();
MyPage.CheckIn("New Page Creation");
PubWeb.DefaultPage = Web.GetFile(MyPage.Url);
PubWeb.Update();

So basically if you look at the top you get the Publishing Site and then you get the Publishing Web. What you want to do next is get one of the layout pages. You could instead of hard-coding in a URL step through a foreach loop and search for the specific layout that you want. What you want to do next is create a new page and then give it the name of the old item, so it will create the item with the same page name and you want to pass in the layout page from the previous step. Next you want to get the Page Content from the Content Area in the “Page Content” field and then update the page. Remember you need to check the item in before you set the welcome page or you will receive a fun little error message. Then you can set the Publishing Web’s default page (welcome page) to your page and update the Publishing Web. I learned the hard way by not updating the Publishing Web the first few times. You also need to remember that you should turn on the flag for Web.AllowUnsafeUpdates otherwise you will not be able to create a page or update anything at all in code. After you are done turn this flag off as a good practice. Remember to dispose all SPWeb and SPSite object if necessary or wrap using statements around everything. I hope you enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Publishing Pages,Page Creation,MOSS

Don’t Complain About SharePoint If You’ve Never Touched Open Source…

MOSSLover — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:15:11 GMT

I have a couple posts coming to this respect, but I had the displeasure of working with Apache, SVN, and Perl these past few weeks. First off I tried learning Perl when I was 16 years old and it never took. I couldn’t understand it. I still don’t understand half of what it does and why you would use it over any other scripting language. The most I ever used it prior to these past few weeks was AOL .eml forms back in the day (http://members.aol.com/jadedixon yeah I know I’m not proud of my 17 year old self). I feel like I’ve been sitting pretty in my C# and ASP .Net world. This project was like a refresher of what I could be doing right now had I never been introduced to the .Net and SharePoint world.

So first off I had do all these insane configurations. You complain that SharePoint takes forever to configure correctly…DONOT ever complain to me about SharePoint. Apache and Subversion are 10x more painful to install. I swear when I installed these two technologies I had no idea what I was doing. What is even better is that I had to statically set the IP for Apache, so that it would not conflict with IIS. IIS is basically the Apache of the Microsoft world so the two just don’t like each other. I also had to set the port number for Apache to some obscure port that was not 80 obviously the port conflicts due to IIS monopolizing it. Oh yeah and did I mention the guide is not straight forward so you have to go into Event Viewer and the Apache and SVN error log files and basically google each error message. Eventually I got past all that insanity after about 2 days of configuration and I had a base environment.

Now at this point you wonder how do I get Perl to work. For me I need to create an Authentication script for SVN that ties into a .Net Webservice that will tie into a Membership Provider. As I said before I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know a lick of Perl. So I started by researching how to use Perl with Apache and how to hit a webservice using Perl. I came across a couple of items that could help me throughout the process. First off you want to install Active Perl, which is Perl for windows. You have to put it in the usr/bin folder on your main drive. Then what you want to do is remove all the IP address static junk you added, but remember to save it for later so you can add it back. Type in “PPM” in run and you will get a list of all the mods available for Perl. I noticed that mod_perl is a must have for Apache and Perl scripting. It makes things run faster and has a whole library that you can access tailored specifically for working with Apache. You need to right click on every prerequisite. I also found a great webservice module called SOAP::Lite that helped me pull the data from the webservice later on. Remember to right click on this module and then when you think you downloaded all the modules no you did not. You have to tell it to run all the actions. This will actually download the modules. If you left on your static ips you cannot download these items because you cannot hit the internet. So now you think your done right?

No you’re not even close, because you now need to go into the Apache configuration files and add some lines of text to tell Apache to recognize mod_perl. You also need to download a .so file and put it in the Apache directories. If you download the wrong one and reference it or mess up your configuration files when you try and start the Apache 2 service it will not budge and send you an obscure error message. If you get some crazy error message you need to go into the logs directory and open the error text file. If you are lucky you might get a nice clean error message that means something. If not well good luck you are going to be shooting in the dark for a few days.

So now I finally got everything setup and I had to figure out the syntax. This part was tricky because there are not a ton of blog posts an forums or documentation on this open source stuff. Everyone was calling there stuff wrong and from what I understand hitting a .Net webservice can be buggy at times with Perl. So at this point I downloaded a Perl Editor called Perl Express and started shooting in the dark. I wrote the entire module and I added it to the configuration files as the Authentication Handler for SVN. I got all kinds of crazy errors that I stepped through with the error logs. Each one more obscure than the last message. It felt like I was shooting at something with a blind fold. Finally I got to a point where I thought everything worked, however it was not popping up a username and password dialog box. So finally after hitting another 800 websites and trying different things it popped up the username and password. I received no more error messages and I thought the script was working.

I was so dead wrong, because the parameters had the username and password, however they were not passing them into the webservice. I spent an entire week trying to figure out what was going on reading forums and blog posts. No one had any documentation. Last night I finally thing hey what about the namespace in my webservice. Some people say you can use tempuri and other people just don’t use it at all. I decided to change my namespace to the uri plus the folder up to the asmx file. Finally everything works, so namespace apparently cannot be the default or Soap::Lite will not pass in the parameters. If you do a debug and a trace it will print the XML out correctly and everything will act fine until you want to pass in parameters. It was cool when everything worked, but I hate the open source world. The documentation is horrendous. At least Microsoft gives us MSDN and the people posting blogs are at least somewhat better. Plus I missed my debugger. I was using Fiddler and Apache error log files. At least with .Net I can attach a debugger and step through code. Maybe there is a way to do it in Perl, but I just don’t see it being easy. It just felt like too much work for something so simple.

If you are reading this blog post please take this with you that you could be working with Perl or Python or even PHP rather than .Net. It could be 10x worse. If you are working with SharePoint and complaining I will yell at you if you even begin to tell me how horrible the developer experience is right now. It could be so much worse guys. Don’t complain. You have it good. We could be working with punch cards or open source. Our salaries could be so much worse. Appreciate what you have, because it could go away in a heart beat.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Perl,Apache 2,Subversion

Where I am Speaking…

MOSSLover — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:03:38 GMT

Here is a list I have compiled thus far and will probably post as things come up:

SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach (January)
Baltimore SharePoint User Group (January)
SharePoint Saturday Boston (February)
Raleigh SharePoint User Group (March)
The Expert’s Conference (April)
New York SharePoint User Group (May)

I am going to attend SharePoint Saturday New York and maybe help out a little. I will probably also attend the Northern NJ .Net User Group and Princeton SharePoint User Group and possibly the New York SharePoint User Group. It will be nice to attend events without running them for a change (not sure how long this will last). If anyone knows of any other good user groups in the Somerville, NJ region let me know. I might hit up Philly Office Geeks, but it’s about an hour and a half away from me so we’ll see what happens. It’s going to take a while to get used to the area. I don’t want to put more than two speaking engagements in one month also. I want to spread it all out over different weeks (maybe one beginning of the month and one end). I also need some time for exploring there is so much to visit like Vermont and Maine and Boston and New York City. It will be a lot of fun. Hopefully the development community out here is just as good as the one in Kansas City. I look forward to meeting a bunch of people in the upcoming months.

Technorati Tags: Speaking,SharePoint

Three Weeks…

MOSSLover — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:54:33 GMT

So I did it. I moved, I ran a SharePoint Saturday, and I attended a wedding. I can’t say everything went smoothly in the process, but I will say it all worked out for the best. I started out my stressful adventure a couple months ago with packing and changing everything over to the new address. Here is my account as best as I can describe it to you guys…

I woke up on Friday, December 11th at about 6 am after sleeping on the floor with my boyfriend. The mover’s came at about 7 am to pack the pod. The night before I moved all the boxes to the living room, so that the mover’s could get everything packed up. I also packed all the extra items into our cars. When the movers came one box ended up dropping, but the contents as I found out were not destroyed. One box cracked from stress and we taped it together. In the end we had to shift some items in our vehicles and we lost the 4 chairs that Leah, Jason, and I sanded down and re-painted. It was really sad, but I at least got to keep the table. After this whole ordeal Johnny and I took a nap on the floor, which was horrible and then Brian Laird came to pick me up. It was time to see Jeff Julian and a few other guys for a going away lunch. We had lunch and Brian and I went to run a ton of errands, such as creating the welcome letter for the event and the online surveys. We ended up at the hotel around 6 or 7 and I saw Lee Brandt. We unpacked everything from Brian’s vehicle and the speaker dinner started for SharePoint Saturday. It was a really great dinner, but I really cannot remember half of it. I was exhausted. A little later we ended up hitting Kinko’s, Brian, Karthik, and I to print out a ton of material for the event. That night we stuffed all the folders as best we could (250 or so folders). They looked awesome, unfortunately we all got to bed around midnight. I left Johnny sleep late.

Saturday, December 12th started with Susan and Gary Lennon giving me a ride to the event. This day was a blur, but from what I can remember a couple crazy things happened. KnowledgeLake was police escorted to the wherehouse at the community college, so that they could find all there banners and such for there booth. A few sponsors showed up late, but everyone in the end got there stamps. From what I can understand everyone was happy with the venue. Next time the electronic stuff might work better if a kiosk was available. The wireless access guy was downstairs instead of upstairs so a few people got lost. All in all we ended the day at Talk of the Town having dinner together. At night we all played dreidel in Joy Earles room which was a ton of fun.

Sunday, December 13th was my last day in Kansas City for a while. We started our adventure at Jerusalem Cafe with Johnny, Eric Harlan, Joy Earles, and Cathy Dew. We got the Flaming Cheese and I got to eat the Vegetarian Platter for the last time. Then we went over to the Boulevard Brewery for a tour. I brought Cathy to the airport afterwards and headed to St. Louis. I saw my friend Jaimie that night.

Monday, December 14th was great, because I got to eat a Simon Kohn’s and Meskeram. It was the perfect send off for St. Louis. I bought a ton of beer at Schlafly for the guys in Jersey and some for Leah and Jason. We had our last night of drinking before I headed to the east coast.

Tuesday, December 15th was a day of driving. We got into Columbus around 6 or 7. I vaguely remember this day. It was pretty uneventful.

Wednesday, December 16th was pretty stressful. I got into Columbus, MD around 2 pm or so. I stopped at a McDonald’s by my aunt’s house. I decided it would be a good idea to call the apartment complex. They had no idea we were coming. This is when the pain started to set in. After hours of talking to these guys Johnny worked it out so we got a 2 bedroom. We did not get the 2 bedroom that we wanted, so we had to change a few things the next day was going to be hectic. We had to get up at 4 am.

Thursday, December 17th was a quick drive and we were at the apartment complex. I had to wait with Gambit in the car for a few hours. It was cold outside so I tried to keep the car heated as much as I could. When the lady showed up she said I needed a money order. My bank was not located in this area. The closest branch was somewhere in the midwest. I had to frantically drive around trying to get money. Finally after moving some money from one place to another and getting money out of this and that account I had the money order. We were able to pick up the keys and tour the apartment. After a few hours of waiting for the Pod to show up and the clock hitting almost noon I called up the company. There was a problem with the machinery, so they could not come until 1:30. Luckily I was able to catch the guys I work with who helped me out. When they arrived around 1:20 the ABF pod guy arrived after I chased the truck (literally ran after it). Everything was unpacked and then we went out to buy all the things we needed.

In the coming days insurance was changed, licenses were bought, and furniture was purchased. In a few weeks we might actually get settled in.

Friday, December 18th was hectic, because we were balancing the drive to Philly and getting stuff done. Luckily, we got to Philly, but it took us 3 hours because of pending snow and traffic. I saw some of my cousins and ate some awesome food. We got home and decided to stay in Saturday due to snow.

Saturday, December 19th was a ton of unpacking and staying inside. Unfortunately, we had no food and it was pretty bad outside. We got a lot unpacked and assembled. It was the first day it was beginning to feel like a real place to live.

Sunday, December 19th was the day of my cousin’s wedding. We made it to the hotel in record time. Pictures were taken and the festivities were had. I was confused with half of what went on because this was my very first Jewish wedding I can remember. It was cool to see all the little rituals. I don’t really know the guy all that well but I think my cousin will be happy. That night I brought my dad back with me to my apartment so that he could help us lift the tv. The tv was a little crooked but things ended up ok overall. I went back to Philly and got to hang out with my grandmother for a little bit.

Of all the days in that 2 week period I think it felt rushed and I couldn’t enjoy it as much as I should have enjoyed it. I loved all the stuff, but I would have loved to space it out a little more. I think next time (if I ever do it again) when I run a SharePoint Saturday I need to space it out away from any major events. I’m glad everything turned out ok, but I was insane to do all that stuff in the same 2 week period. I think I’m still recovering from all the events. I probably won’t fully recover for another 2 months.

Technorati Tags: SPS KC,Crazy Times