I run a scripted deployment process each time new (SharePoint) solutions are ready for QA, or any environment for that matter. We script a series of commands, specifically:
Uninstall-SPSolution, Remove-SPSolution, Add-SPSolution and finally Install-SPSolution.
Before running these commands, along with a number of other checks, we perform Get-SPSite to ensure the site is available and fail early if need be. If our custom solution has not been deployed then viewing any page under any of the web application’s site collections fails with an exception due to a failure to find one of the solution assemblies. This is because we have custom membership and claims providers which are defined in the solution assembly and are referenced in the web.config for the web application. Despite this, any SPSite and SPWeb objects can be obtained safely via PowerShell as forms authentication is not taking place.
So I was surprised to find that the Get-SPSite check failing during deployment today with a failure to locate the assembly containing the membership and claims providers. I did not discover the root cause as to why this suddenly occurred but will outline what it took to fix it.
In the end I was able to ” Install-SPSolution -force ” to recover from this situation but not before stopping and starting the SharePoint Administration Service across all Web servers in the farm. The service was not stopped on any of the machines however the Install job was never completing despite the timer job history in Central Administration stating that the job had been successful. Upon restarting all this service the Install-SPSolution command would then complete.
Credit to Andreas’ blog for putting me in the right direction.
