In my current project we are migrating a custom sharepoint solution from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013. One of the improvements is that we migrate custom field choices to Managed Metadata. Choice Fields were not intended to be so many. So now it is time to convert them to metadata terms. I have written a PowerShell script which copies all the choices from a field to a termset. The script uses Client Side Object Model (CSOM) to get the choice values and it uses Server Object Model to write data to the termset.

In my project I deploy some apps directly through the ObjectModel directly with PowerShell. The apps are built with TFS I have a script that installs or updates apps if there is a new version of the app. Previously I used Import-SPAppPackage to compare the version and productid with an existing app instance, but often I get this error:

The provided App differs from another App with the same version and product ID.

Today I got a question:

How many lines of code are there in our SharePoint solution?

After a little search, I found that PowerShell is really a nice tool to count lines of code:

• How do you count lines of code (stackoverflow)?

I wanted to count lines for different types of code:

1. Code Behind written in C#, the files have .cs file extension
2. JavaScript code (except jQuery, angular or knockout frameworks)
3. PowerShell files (.ps1 and psm1)
4. Xml files (all the SharePoint .xml files)

Here is the powershell code that counts lines of code:

Last Saturday I attended Leetspeak. Among many awesome speeches and presentations I discovered scriptcs. scriptcs lets you write C# code directly in the console, or execute scripts written with just your favourite editor. Please see more about it on the site. What I thought during Justin Rusbatch’s session at Leetspeak:

Can we use scriptcs in SharePoint?

Technically there is no limitations in SharePoint for scriptcs. Any .NET code can be registered, imported and invoked in a console or in a standalone script. Here is the simple code for instantiating a site collection and disposing it:

How many instances of jquery are there in your SharePoint farm?

Get-SPWebApplication http://dev `
  | Select -Expand Sites `
  | Select -Expand AllWebs `
  | Select -Expand Lists `
  | Select -Expand Items `
  | ? { $_.Url -match "jquery.*.js" } `
  | select Name, Url

Have you more than two (jquery and jquery-ui), then you have too much. You can save much place and performance by using Content Delivery Network (CDN) links for the resources like javascript, css, fonts and icons. Consider those Content Delivery Networks:

Today just a quick one-liner tip for PowerShell.  Use this script to set a proxy server in IE Settings. I got the inspiration from Aymeric’s blog:  Scripting : Toggle proxy server in IE settings with PowerShell:

sp AutoConfigUrl "http://proxy.contoso.com" `
  -Path "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings"

By the way sp is just alias for Set-ItemProperty cmdlet:

This corresponds these settings in IE (Tools - Internet Options - Connections - Lan Settings):

Great tutorial how to configure the loopback check on a dev machine. Exactly what I needed for a month ago. Pity that this article came after that. :-) Here is the command to disable it completeley:

\# Disable Loopback check http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861 #
New-ItemProperty HKLM:\\System\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\Lsa -Name "DisableLoopbackCheck" -Value "1" -PropertyType dword

During an installation with AutoSPInstaller on my development machine I ran into a strange issue. I got the following error:

System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.IIS.PowerShell.Framework’ or one of its dependencies

I haven’t found any other people having the same problem with the AutoSPInstaller, but I found a similar report on another forum: help.octopusdeploy.com. Maybe I am the only one who gets this error in AutoSPInstaller, if not it can be useful to write the solution down. The error occurs when the default web site in IIS is stopped. For some reason Get-WebSite cmdlet throws an exception the first time you invoke it, but not the second time. To get it working I followed the tip from the help.octopusdeploy.com and wrapped the Get-Website code in a try-and-catch, where the same cmdlet was in try and in catch. This line:

For a while ago I needed to copy all files from a document library within a SharePoint 2007 site to the hard drive. So I didn’t need to copy files from SharePoint to SharePoint so I couldn’t use the stsadm -o export command or Chris O’Brien’s nice SharePoint Content Deployment Wizard. I came across the SPIEFolder application which should work with SharePoint 2007 and 2010. It has a site on codeplex: spiefolder.codeplex.com, but neither the binary nor the source code can be downloaded from there. After some searching I found the binary in the author’s skydrive. The fact that the source code was not available seemed as an disanvantage because I could not know what code was run. Nevertheless I tried it out and it didn’t work:

PowerShell is a great tool. It helps in SharePoint administration and tasks automation. Today I needed to provision a webpart on many similar pages. This third-party webpart’s constructor instantiates a dataaccess service and uses a connectionstring which is stored in the web.config file. So the webpart creation failed until I found a way to load the configuration into powershell. First you can create a simple file powershell.exe.config, put it into $pshome (C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0). In that file you can specify the connectionstring in the same way like in the web.config (or app.config). But it is not secure: the connectionstring can be changed in the future, and you really don’t want to copy your connectionstrings around. So there is a better way: Check out Ohad Israeli’s blog post about how a configuration file can be bound dynamically in a .net assembly: Binding to a custom App.Config file. In PowerShell you can do the same, all we need is to modify the syntax: StackOverflow: Powershell Calling .NET Assembly that uses App.config: