Hi all,
I’m a long time software developer with absolutely no experience in Sharepoint.
I have just joined a new company and I was asked by the team leader to create an installer for Sharepoint Foundation 2013 and a working Sharepoint solution made by the company, preferably using HTA.
I have experimented installing it manually and deploying the solution, however, what’s the best method to automate these two steps?
I was thinking of something like AutoSPInstaller, and after the end of the installation, I would run Add-SPSolution and Install-SPSolution commands for deploying the solution.
What do you think?
HTAs are not unsupported, and Microsoft continues to use them in setup of their products (e.g. SharePoint 2013 launches an HTA on autorun).
But the idea of HTAs is a little out dated. You can do a lot of UI-based interaction with PowerShell, generating windowed prompts (e.g. choice lists or password prompts).
But given you’re using Foundation, deploying Search just isn’t going to be possible (per Vlad and your TN forum post, the only way to do so is via reflection which isn’t supported).
There are many examples of HTA Â based setup. However, my main concern is that this technology is becoming obsolete now that Microsoft has stopped supporting it….
I think I’ll just stick to good-ol’ C#
I guess HTA Â = HTML Application right? :P. Well, you can’t install sharepoint using html, so you can have a pretty html page, but you still need PowerShell or c# in the background :).Â
Thank you Vlad for the reply….
Using PowerShell scripts exclusively is not a good option as my goal is making a “pretty” installation program for the end user, that’s why I was advised to use HTA.
So the question now is: what modern option do you recommend for making such installation screen?
AutoSPInstaller doesn’t really work with Foundation since foundation has very limited features / powershell commands.
I would steal some powershell from AutoSPInstaller for all the stuff until configuring, but then I would do custom powershell for the service applications & Web apps & Solution deploy. Also, note there is no “supported” way of creating a search service application in Foundation by powershell. You have to use reflection to do it (google for blog posts by Jasjit Chopra or gary lapointe).
Hope it helped 🙂Â
