Register your own parameter completer in PowerShell for PnP Cmdlets

UPDATE: While the information below is still relevant for basically any cmdlet in your PowerShell modules (so it does not only apply to PnP PowerShell), in the upcoming version 3.0 of PnP PowerShell we have built-in support for autocompletion on List names, Content Type names, Fields and Property Bag keys. For instance, typing Get-PnPList -Identity<tab> will automatically retrieve all the lists in the current site for you to pick from. Continue reading

Speed tip for PnP PowerShell

Did you know that retrieving 20 list items like this for($i=1;$i -lt 20;$i++) { Get-PnPListItem -List "My List" -Id $i } is so much slower than $list = Get-PnPList "My List" for($i=1;$i -lt 20;$i++) { Get-PnPListLitem -List $list -Id $i } ? The reason behind this is that the cmdlet Get-PnPListItem for every execution where you use the name ‘My List’ will have to make an extra call to the server to figure out the details about that list before it is able to retrieve the item. Continue reading

PowerShell: Debugging Tip

When I work on PnP PowerShell (https://github.com/pnp/powershell) I code either in VSCode or in Visual Studio as I write the cmdlets in C#. During development I need to debug the cmdlets I’m building so I need to attach the debugger to the PowerShell session where I run my cmdlets. If there is one PowerShell window/tab running, then there is no problem. However… When I run multiple PowerShell sessions (no surprise: I most of the time do…) then which process do I attach to? Continue reading

PowerShell: Easy Navigation Between Folders

If you, like me, have a folder where you navigate to a lot in PowerShell maybe this tip is a handy one for you. The folder in my case contains my GitHub/Code repositories. I navigate around on my computer with PowerShell, but sometimes I simply want to jump back to that location from wherever I am, without needing to enter something like cd c:\users\erwin\repositories\myrepositoryfolder etc. etc. Wouldn’t it be nicer if you get enter something alike repo myrepositoryfolder instead? Continue reading

Cross Platform PnP PowerShell Released

After close to more than 2 years or work we finally are ready to release a preview build of PnP PowerShell for PowerShell Core! (Check out the original post) Why did it take so long? A few factors came into play here. At the MVP Summit in Redmond in 2018 I already demoed a version of PnP PowerShell running on MacOS. For that we needed to a few things: We needed to have the Microsoft Client Object Model for SharePoint library (CSOM) available for . Continue reading

Setting up your Office 365 CDN with PnP Provisioning or PnP PowerShell

The upcoming build of the PnP Provisioning Engine now allows you to configure your tenant CDN settings through a template. In this short post I show you how to configure your CDN with both the PnP Provisioning Engine and PnP PowerShell PnP Provisioning While the current schema (2018-01) already supports these elements, the actual engine does not implement them yet. We will release this functionality in the April 2018 (2.25.1804.0) release. Continue reading

PnP PowerShell vs SharePoint Online Management Shell

Well, it’s not really a matter of one versus the other. When we started of with PnP PowerShell, we used the -SPO prefix in the cmdlets, the same as what the by Microsoft provided SharePoint Online Management Shell is using. And while that worked quite okay, we ran into an issue when we released the Get-SPOSite cmdlet. That one was available already in the SharePoint Online Management Shell. Result: conflict. Which one should PowerShell use? Continue reading