Category Archives: Powershell

SharePoint Online 2013 ALM Practices

SharePoint has always been a bit a challenge when it comes to structured ALM and developer practices which is something Microsoft partially addressed with the release of SharePoint and Visual Studio 2010. Deploying and building solutions for SharePoint 2013 pretty much retains most of the IP from 2010 with the noted deprecation of Sandbox Solutions (this means they’ll be gone in SharePoint vNext).

As part of the project I’m leading at Kloud at the moment we are rebuilding an Intranet so it runs on SharePoint Online 2013 so I wanted to share some of the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) processes we’ve been using.

Packaging

Most of the work we have been doing to date has leveraged existing features within the SharePoint core – we have, however, spent time utilising the Visual Studio 2012 SharePoint templates to package our customisations so they can be moved between multiple environments. SharePoint Online still provides support for Sandboxed Solutions and we’ve found that they provide a convenient way to deploy elements that are not developed as Apps. Designer packages can also be exported and edited in Visual Studio and produce a re-deployable package (which result in Sandboxed Solutions).

Powershell

At the time of writing, the number of Powershell Commandlets for managing SharePoint Online are substantially less those for on-premise. If you need to modify any element below a Site Collection you are pretty much forced to write custom tooling or perform the tasks manually – we have made a call in come cases to build tooling using the Client Side Object Model (CSOM) or to perform tasks manually.

Development Environment

Microsoft has invested some time in the developer experience around SharePoint Online and now provides you with free access to an “Office 365 Developer Site” which gives you a single-license Office 365 environment in which to develop solutions. The General Availability of Office 365 Wave 15 (the 2013 suite) sees these sites only being available for businesses holding enterprise (E3 or E4) licenses.  Anyone else will need to utilise a 30 day trial tenant.

We have had each team member setup their own site and develop solutions locally prior to rolling them into our main deployment. Packaging and deployment is obviously key here as we need to be able to keep the developer instances in sync with each other and the easiest way to achieve that is with WSPs that can be redeployed as required.

One other item we have done around development is to utilise an on-premise setup in a VM to provide developers with a more rapid development experience in some cases (and more transparent troubleshooting). As you mostly stick to the SharePoint CSOM a lot of your development these days resides in JavaScript which means you shouldn’t hit any snags in relying in on-premise / full-trust features in your delivered solutions.

Note that the Office 365 Developer Site is a single-license environment which means you can’t do multi-user testing or content targeting. That’s where test environments come into play!

Test Environment

The best way to achieve a more structured ALM approach with Office 365 is to leverage an intermediate test environment – the easiest way for anyone to achieve this is to register for a trial Office 365 tenant – while only technically available for 30 days this still provides you with the ability to test prior to deploying to your production environment.

Once everything is tested and good to go into production you’re already in a position to know the steps involved in deployment!

As you can see – it’s still not a perfect world for SharePoint ALM, but with a little work you can get to a point where you are at least starting to enforce a little rigour around build and deployment.

Hope this helps!

Useful Links

Clean Backups Using Windows Server Backup and EBS Snapshots

One of the powerful features of AWS is the ability to snapshot any EBS volume you have operating. The challenge when utilising Windows 2008 R2 is that NTFS doesn’t support point-in-time snapshotting which can result in an inconsistent EBS snapshot. You can still create a snapshot but it may be that one or more file that was mid-change may not be accurate (or usable) in the resulting snapshot.

How to solve

The answer, it turns out, is fairly easy (if a little convoluted) – Windows Server Backup PLUS EBS snapshots.

In order for this to work you will need:

1. Windows Server Backup installed on your Instance (this does not require a reboot on install).

2. An appropriately sized EBS volume to support your intended backup (see the Technet arcticle on how to work out your allowance – remember you can always create a new volume later if you get the size wrong!)

3. Windows Task Scheduler (who needs Quartz or cron ;) ).

4. Some Powershell Foo.

Volume Shadow Copy using the new EBS Volume

Once you have created your new EBS volume and attached it to the Instance you want to backup, open up Windows Server Backup and select what you want to backup (full, partial, custom – to be honest you shouldn’t need to do a “bare metal” backup….)  Note that Windows Server Backup will delete *everything* on the target EBS volume and it will no longer show up in Windows Explorer – it will still be attached and show up in Disk Manager, but you can’t copy files to or from it.

The benefit of Windows Server Backup is that it will utilise Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)  resulting in a clean copy of files – even those in-flight at the time of backup.  This gets around the inability to “freeze” NTFS at runtime.

Set your schedule and save the backup.

Snapshot the backup volume

Now you have a nice clean static copy of the filesystem you can go ahead and create an EBS snapshot.  The best way I found to schedule this was to use some Powershell magic written by the guys over at messors.com.  I slightly modified the Daily Snapshot Powershell to snapshot a pre-defined Instance and Volume by calling the CreateSnapshotForInstance function that takes an Instance and Volume identifier.  The great thing with this script setup is it auto-manages the expiry of old snapshots so my S3 usage doesn’t just keep on growing.

I invoke this Powershell on the success of the initial Windows Server Backup scheduled task by using the Task Scheduling – see this post at Binary Royale on how to do this (they send an email – I use the same approach to do a snapshot instead).

The great thing about the Powershell is that it will send you an email once completed – I have also setup mail notifications at completion of the Windows Server Backup (success, failure, disk full) so I can know when / if the backup fails at an early stage.  Note that in Windows Server 2008 R2 you can send an email right in Windows Task Scheduler – on AWS you’ll need to have an IIS smart host up and running to support this though – see my earlier post on how to set up a IIS SES relay host.

Summary

The benefit of this approach is a consistent state for your backup contents as well as an easy way to do a controlled restore at a later date (“create volume from snapshot” in the AWS management console and then attach to an Instance).  Additionally you achieve a reasonably reliable backup for not much more than the cost of EBS I/O and S3 I/O and storage costs.

Hope you find this useful.

Dr. Script or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Powershell

Powershell has been with us now since late 2006 but my experience is that widespread understanding and use of it is still very restricted within the .Net developer community.  If you’re a Windows administrator, operator or release manager I’m sure you’re all over it.  If you’re job description doesn’t fit in one of those three groups and you’re not inclined to understand how your software will be deployed or operated then the chances are you don’t know much about Powershell.

I have to say that Powershell’s syntactic differences to the “standard” C# most developers would know is an easy place to start disliking working with it (for example it’s not “==” for equals it’s “-eq” and null becomes $null).  I say to those developers: it’s worth persevering because you stand to gain a lot once you get your head around it.

If you need to deploy something to test or debug it or you have an awkward environment with which to work with (I’m looking at you SharePoint 2010) then you will save yourself a lot of time by scripting out as much manual stuff as you can.  Your release managers and ops teams will also love you if you can provide scripts that allow them to deploy without needing to perform a massive number of manual steps (if you ever want to get to the Continuous Deployment nirvana you can’t really avoid working with a scripting language).

I’m currently working on a project that includes the need for 84 IIS Websites in a load balanced environment.  These sites follow a pattern – think I want to manually configure 84 IIS instances?  Right.  I have a Powershell script that will setup each site including a new local windows login for the Application Pool, setup the Application Pool (including user), create the Website (including folders and holding page and association with the Application Pool) and set all various host headers I need.  Finally it will grant my WebDeploy user rights to deploy to the site.  I’ll put a version of that script up in a future post.

On the same project we’ve used Powershell and the Amazon Web Services .Net SDK to provide tooling for use to push database backups from SQL Server to S3 (what, no RDS yet for SQL Server????)  That’s another trick – you get full access to .Net in Powershell simply by pulling in a reference to the right .Net assembly.

Anyway, I could bang on about why you need to learn Powershell if you haven’t, but I’ll pick up this thread in a future post when I provide a sample script for setting up IIS  sites.

On a side note I read about the death of Adam Yauch (MCA) from the Beastie Boys on May 4th – he’d been battling cancer for the last three years and most certainly didn’t deserve to put down the mic at 47.  This one’s for him.