André Krijnen

Every developer has one of those days that everything goes wrong. You developed some feature, and you decided to change the namespace of the feature. For some reason or another SharePoint 2010 doesn’t handle this well, and even Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t know how to handle it. So you received a message that you allready activated a feature with the same Id you want to deploy? And you can’t revert it in someway?

Well I thought to use PowerShell to uninstall these spfeatures which I tried, but the message was cloud and clear, can’t uninstall feature, because feature isn’t found? Huh?? Why is that? Well I tried Get-SPFeature to retreive all the features I installed, and what did I see? My features standing in that list, so I tried to remove it by Id, and what happend? Can’t find feature by Id? Crap you would say? Well I used the WssAnalyzerTool from code.msdn.microsoft.com and managed to get all the failing features.

Then I tried to run the WssRemoveFeaturesTool from the same code.msdn.microsoft.com site, but what did you say? Even that tool couldn’t find that feature… Imagine that… So the last resort: yes the plain old fashioned stsadm. Did that work well, yes!! It worked more then you could think off.

stsadm -o disablefeature -Id -force ==> Operation completed successfully
stsadm -o Uninstallfeature -id -force ==> Operation completed successfully

So you think you can do everything with powershell, well sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t.