Scripting is heavily used in SharePoint development due to the use of STSADM.exe. STSADM is used to run various commands on a SharePoint Farm, but most commonly used in Development is the adding and deployment of SharePoint Solution Packages. Rather than have to type the STSADM commands manually all the time, scripts are used to allow the same commands to be re-run. There are two main scripting languages used in the SharePoint Development community:
DOS BAT scripts
.bat scripts have been around for a long time and people are familiar with them. and are therefore
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| They can be run on any Windows environment machine (client or server) | No access to the SharePoint object model directly |
| Accepted by Administrators all over the world (because they can understand them) |
Examples
PowerShell scripts
PowerShell 1.0 is available to be installed on all Windows machines (client and server) and is becoming more and more popular among administrators and developers. PowerShell is an extremely powerful language that allows reflection into DLLs and therefore access to the SharePoint object model.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Rumoured to be heavily used in SharePoint 2010 | Requires security commands to be run to execute scripts |
| Can execute using reflection anything within a DLL | Requires an install of PowerShell on Windows client or server |
| Can access the SharePoint object model directly | Some Administrators are not up to speed and don't like the flexibility and power being granted to Developers |
| Extremely similar syntax to C# and can handle recursion etc with functions |
Getting started with PowerShell
Advanced PowerShell
- SSP User Profile Development - using PowerShell to manage User Profiles
Comments (1)
Apr 17, 2009
Ajay Sawant says:
How about "Windows Explorer WSP Context Menu Commands" - http://blogs.pointbridg...How about "Windows Explorer WSP Context Menu Commands" - http://blogs.pointbridge.com/Blogs/scheele_dave/Pages/Post.aspx?_ID=21