In my previous post, I showed you how easy it was to leverage your knowledge of the IIS 7 managed SDK in Windows PowerShell.  We loaded the IIS 7 managed assemblies and then traversed the object model to display site information and stop application pools.  While this in itself was pretty cool, I don’t think I quite got my point across about how powerful IIS 7 and PowerShell are together. As such, I wanted to show you some more fun things to do with PowerShell in the name of easy IIS 7 administration.

First, our examples still required a great deal of typing and piping and filtering.  Let’s modify our profile script from my previous post by adding at least one new global variable that will give us access to the ServerManager without much typing.  Add the following line to your profile script from my previous post.

new-variable iismgr -value (New-Object Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager) -scope "global"

(if you don’t have a profile script yet, go back to my previous post to learn how to create one).

Note: If you signed your script before, you’ll have to do it again after modifying the script

Open a new instance of PowerShell and now you can access the site collection just by typing:

PS C:> $iismgr.Sites

 That’s considerably smaller than our previous examples.  But let’s not stop there.  What happens if I want to search the site collection? PowerShell has some fun syntax for this as well. I simply pipe the output of my SiteCollection to a “Where-Object” cmdlet and then specify what site I’m looking for:

$iismgr.Sites | Where-Object {$_.Name -match "Default*"}

This is still quite a bit of typing when all I really want to do is find the default website. You may ask “Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just add a “Find” method to the SiteCollection object?” Well I’m glad you asked *cough*! Next, we are going to do just that! Open up another instance of notepad and add the following XML to it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<!-- *******************************************************************
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.
 
THIS SAMPLE CODE AND INFORMATION IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY 
OF ANY KIND,WHETHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO 
THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND/OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE. IF THIS CODE AND INFORMATION IS MODIFIED, THE ENTIRE RISK OF USE
OR RESULTS IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OF THIS CODE AND INFORMATION 
REMAINS WITH THE USER.
******************************************************************** -->
<Types>
  <Type>
    <Name>Microsoft.Web.Administration.SiteCollection</Name>
      <Members>
        <ScriptMethod>
          <Name>Find</Name>
          <Script>
          $rtr = "";
          if ( $args[0] ) 
          { $name = $args[0];
            $rtr = ((New-Object Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager).Sites | 
                     Where-Object {$_.Name -match $name}) 
          } 
          else 
          { 
            $rtr = "No sites found." 
          };
          $rtr
          </Script>
        </ScriptMethod>
      </Members>
  </Type>
</Types>

What we’ve done is identified that we want to add a scripted method to the Microsoft.Web.Administration.SiteCollection object. In our case, I’ve added a “Find” method by using the same cmdlet t at we typed before to search the site collection. The difference is, this type I use the $args array variable to check for a parameter and use it if one is available. Now, save this file into your %windir%system32WindowsPowerShellv1.0 directory as “iis.types.ps1xml”. Once you’ve saved the file, sign it the same way you signed your profile script. Keep in mind that these xml files contain code, so signing your xml is required to keep your PowerShell experience a secure one. Now, open your profile script (again) and add the following lines to the end:

new-variable iissites -value (New-Object Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager).Sites -scope "global"
new-variable iisapppools -value (New-Object Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager).ApplicationPools -scope "global"
update-typedata -append (join-path -path $PSHome -childPath "iis.types.ps1xml")

Note: Once again, you’ll have to re-sign this profile if your execution policy requires signed scripts.

Notice that I added two more variables: $iissites and $iisapppools. These variables allow me to access the site collection and application pool collection with a simple keyword. Lets try them out in PowerShell. Make sure you open a new instance of PowerShell so your profile script and xml type data are updated properly. Once your new instance of PowerShell is open, type the following:

PS C:> $iissites.Find("^Default*")

PowerShell will do all the work for you and you have MUCH less typing to do.

Another alternative to using xml files is to simply create a function and add it to your profile. For instance, we can create a function called “findsite” that provides the same functionality as our previous example. Either type the following command into PowerShell or add it to your profile script:

PS C:> function findsite { $name=$args[0]; ((New-Object Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager).Sites | Where-Object {$_.Name -match $name}); } }

Now you can search for a site using the following syntax:

PS C:> findsite default*

Whatever way we choose to extend Microsoft.Web.Administration and/or PowerShell, we can use our output as we did before:

PS C:> (findsite default*).Id

The previous line should display the Id of the default web site. We can also stop the website:

PS C:> (findsite default*).Stop()

We can keep taking this to extremes and truncate every operation that we perform on a semi-regular basis. These scripts are not one-offs. Each script function we create or append to an existing object model can be reused and piped as input to another function. The possibilities are endless and completely customizable to your needs.