3.3 for Sitecore 7 and 8

Version 3.3

Yet another monthly update and in many aspects a major one!

Full issue list available on GitHub - 35 issues and new contributing members @Kasaku & @marrrcin!

Summary of important changes

New Features

• Major re-work to our script session management engine allowing us to 463 spin up new script sessions from your scripts. This allows you to divide scripts into asynchronous parts that can execute in parallel or run operations that would otherwise 462 cause your remoting operations to time out.
• You can even 475 run more interactive sessions from an existing interactive session!
• The 454 remoting web service added the ability to download large files streamed from server rather than serialized in a SOAP envelope and this has already been 461 conveniently exposed using our remoting module!
• Our new member has contributed a cool functionality that 472 allows you to reset fields and layouts to standard values.
• More of the PowerShell scripts that you can find online will also work OOTB for you as we have implemented the logic that 471 allows the Read-Host command to run in our interactive sessions. This command will now pop-up a dialog asking you to provide a line of text like it would in Windows PowerShell.
• Your scripts using 473 Read-Variable can now request for strings from users that will be hidden from the prying eyes of bystanders when you specify the Editor to be password. The typed characters will be replaced with the standard password masking characters in the editor. Your script will still receive a proper string back though.

Enhancements

• One weakness the script session management exposed particularly was that 479 interactive cmdlets like Read-Variable would cause a script session to hang in non interactive scenario as there would be no UI to handle the message from the script. This has now been fixed and 475 sessions are aware whether they are interactive or not.
• To compliment the new functionality we have 467 extended the Background Session Manager available from the toolbox to show next to each session whether it is busy running a script or not.
• 476 Script sessions are now also aware whether they are busy running script or not and will gracefully reject another script being sent to them if asked to execute one.
• it is now significantly easier to find the item template when using the New-Item command as the -ItemType parameter now features a fully dynamic autocompletion.
• The 448 Broken Links report now can analyse all versions, not just the latest one.
• The 447 Lock-Item command now supports transferring a lock to another user. If the item is piped to it that is already locked - using the -Force parameter will cause the lock to be transferred to the new user specified in the command.
• Some of the 446 commonly used types have gotten type accelerators specified for them so you can use those and cast to them much easier.
• Last but not least our second new contributor @marrrcin has contributed 444 a way to Get-ChildItem by providing item ID with the -ID parameter rather than using the path.

  Fixes

• We discovered that when removing more than one rendering the 453 Remove-Rendering command encountered an error .
• The very useful 455 Get-ItemReference command returned the wrong item, so we fixed that.
• Lots and lots more of them... actually 10 more!

Potential Breaking Changes

• You may find that the changes to 463 Get-ScriptSession syntax can potentially interfere with scripts using it.