Month: April 2010

Here’s something that gave me a bit of trouble: I was attempting to run a script to upgrade a bunch of SharePoint solutions, and I wrote it like this:

dir –Recurse –Filter *.wsp | %{ stsadm –o upgradesolution –name $_ –filename $_.FullName –allowgacdeployment –local }

Now, that actually works, but since I hadn’t tested it before, I figured I’d echo the command out first, so I tried this:

dir –Recurse –Filter *.wsp | %{ echo "stsadm –o upgradesolution –name $_ –filename $_.FullName –allowgacdeployment –local" }

Which is all well and good, except it echos out something like the following:

stsadm –o upgradesolution -name Foo.wsp -filename Foo.wsp.FullName -allowgacdeployment -local

The reason this happens is that the string expansion in PowerShell has no way of knowing that I meant to expand the property instead of printing out the literal characters. Having figured this out, the next thing I tried was:

echo "${_.FullPath}"

Which doesn’t work either. Crap. I’m not familiar enough with the PowerShell syntax to explain why that is, but after a moment of pondering I finally figured out something that does work – expressions:

dir –Recurse –Filter *.wsp | %{ echo "stsadm –o upgradesolution –name $_ –filename $($_.FullName) –allowgacdeployment –local" }

The $() syntax allows us to evaluate any arbitrary expression, which is then inserted into the string. Yay!