Make your own command for deleting SharePoint web site including all sub webs

If you try to use sharepoint administration tool stsadm.exe to delete website you will probably notice that deleting website with this command is not possible if web contains sub-webs. This is highly frustrating especially if you have large structure of web/sub-webs for deleting.

Simple recursive iteration thru all subwebs will do the trick. Gary Lapointe published one solution for this problem here. This solution extends existing stsadm.exe tool with new command for recursive deleting. The drawback in this implementation is that all webs in a given site collection will be deleted.

Following code will delete ONLY specified website including all sub-webs.

Simple and useful.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using System.IO;

namespace deleteweb
{
    class Program
    {

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            if (args.Length > 0)
            {
                string url = args[0];
                SPSite site = null;

                //Open site collection
                try
                {
                    site = new SPSite(url);
                    if (site == null)
                    {
                        Console.WriteLine("Site cannot be opened");
                        return;
                    }
                }
                catch
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("Site cannot be opened");
                    return;
                }

                //Find site-relative url for web
                string weburl = url.Replace(site.Url, string.Empty).TrimStart(Convert.ToChar("/"));
                SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb(weburl);
                DeleteWeb(web);
            }
        }

        private static void DeleteWeb(SPWeb web)
        {
            try
            {
                foreach (SPWeb subweb in web.Webs)
                {
                    DeleteWeb(subweb);
                }
                web.Delete();
                Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} DELETED", web.Url));
            }
            catch (FileNotFoundException)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} NOT FOUND", web.Url));
            }
            catch
            {
                Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} CANNOT BE DELETED", web.Url));
            }
        }

    }
}