PowerShell

Microsoft has launched the Windows PowerShell Command Builder for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products and Microsoft Office 365 allowing you to create PowerShell commands graphically and more easily than if you had to type them yourself.

It is a simple Silverlight application but it allows you to make queries (SharePoint Server 2010, Foundation 2010, and Office 365) that can be more complex:

The documentation is here!

Happy PowerShell

When you want to make changes to the web.config file of your SharePoint 2010 application, you can use two methods:

• Create a webconfig.<your_name>.xml file that you add to the \CONFIG directory (Source on MSDN)
• Do it programmatically and use the SPWebConfigModification and SPWebApplication.WebConfigApplication objects (Source on MSDN).

However, when you use the second method and remove the changes from the file using Remove(), the changes are not removed. Even if you use .Update() and .ApplyWebConfigModifications(). This may only result in your modification appearing multiple times in the web.config file, but if you insert more sensitive modifications to uniqueness, such as for an HttpModule, it creates an error that prevents the site from functioning (Error 500).

Context

You are developing a SharePoint 2010 application using Visual Studio 2010 on a Windows 2008 64-bit server. You want to run a post-deployment script (PowerShell for example) for debugging:

The Problem

When you add a script, for example: powershell $(ProjectDir)\PowerShellScript\MySuperPowerShellScript.ps1

You always get an error when running the script:

Error occurred in deployment step ‘Run Post-Deployment Command’: The command "powershell $(ProjectDir)\PowerShellScript\MySuperPowerShellScript.ps1" exited with error code: 1.

This error is due to the fact that VS2010 runs in 32-bit mode, as well as its post-deployment scripts, and the SharePoint 2010 APIs run in 64-bit mode. This creates errors when executing the script.