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.

An alternative to store key-value paired properties in appSettings in web.config we can use Sharepoint_config database by creating our own SPPersistedObject. First we have to create a class which inherits from SPPersistedObject and decorate its properties with [Persisted]: namespace Takana.SharePoint { public class Settings: SPPersistedObject { \[Persisted\] public string DbConString; public LinkCheckerPersistedSettings() { } public LinkCheckerPersistedSettings(string name, SPPersistedObject parent) : base(name, parent) { } } } ```Then we must create such an object.

SPWebConfigModification. Some links to start with: http://panvega.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/using-spwebconfigmodification-within-a-feature-receiver/ http://www.onedotnetway.com/get-name-of-current-executing-assembly-in-c/ http://blogs.devhorizon.com/reza/?p=459 http://ikarstein.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/add-web-config-modification-with-powershell-spwebconfigmodification/ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb861909.aspx public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { var webapp = parent as SPWebApplication; if (webapp != null) { var mod1 = GetWebControlsConfigMod(); webapp.WebConfigModifications.Add(mod1); var mod2 = GetConStringConfigMod(); webapp.WebConfigModifications.Add(mod2); SaveChanges(webapp); } else { Log.Warning("no modifications to webapp are done"); } } public override void FeatureDeactivating(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { var webapp = parent as SPWebApplication; if (webapp != null) { var mod = GetWebControlsConfigMod(); var modsCollection = webapp.