Powershell, SharePoint Solutions, and Waiting for Deployment

When installing SharePoint solution packages using Powershell, you’ll need to wait for the solution to be installed after calling install-spsolution before you can enable features using enable-spfeature.  As a part of an automated script, you’d like for the script to know when the install is finished before continuing.

It’s surprisingly easy and can be accomplished with only a tiny bit of code:

That’s it!

On uninstall, the process is a little bit different as uninstall-spsolution does not return an instance of the solution.  You will want to grab the solution before you start the retraction:

This helps make for a much smoother install and uninstall process as you can be more certain that your solution is installed before executing code dependent on the solution (feature activation, solution removal, etc).