haliphax

According to the documentation for the SharePoint 2010 SDK, you cannot trigger Audience compilation programmatically. Well—that's not true. It isn't documented, but it is possible. The painful thing about it is that you must know the ApplicationId of the UserProfileService application. This is where reflection comes in extremely handy!

Below, you will find two incredibly similar snippets of code: one C# example and one PowerShell example. They both focus on reflecting to grab the ApplicationId and then using the RunAudienceJob method to queue the compilation. I found many examples online that explain the method call, and many that showed how to use reflection to pull out the ApplicationId, but none of the articles I found showed the whole picture from start to finish. Here you go.

C# server-side code:

SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()
{
	// get the assembly which hosts the UserProfile class
	Assembly userProfilesAssembly = typeof(UserProfile).Assembly;
	// get the type of the UserProfileApplicationProxy
	Type userProfileApplicationProxyType =
		userProfilesAssembly.GetType("Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy");
	// get the proxy object
	object proxy =
		SPServiceContext.Current.GetDefaultProxy(userProfileApplicationProxyType);
	// get the UserProfileApplication property which holds the actual application
	object profile = proxy.GetType().GetProperty("UserProfileApplication",
		BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(proxy, null);
	// get the Id of the application
	Guid applicationId =
		((Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPersistedObject)profile).Id;

	string[] args = new string[4];
	// application ID of UserProfileApplication
	args[0] = applicationId.ToString();
	// 1 = start, 0 = stop
	args[1] = "1";
	// 1 = full, 0 = incremental
	args[2] = "0";
	// audience name
	args[3] = "Audience Name";

	// compile the audience
	int result = Microsoft.Office.Server.Audience.AudienceJob.RunAudienceJob(args);
	AudienceJobReturnCode returnCode =
		(AudienceJobReturnCode)Enum.Parse(typeof(AudienceJobReturnCode),
			result.ToString());
});

Note: You must run the PowerShell script as a Farm Administrator user, or you will be unsuccessful!

PowerShell command-line code:

if((Get-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null) {
	Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell"
}

$site = Get-SPSite "http://location.of.site"
$audience = "Audience Name"
$context = Get-SPServiceContext $site
$proxy = $context.GetDefaultProxy([Microsoft.Office.Server.Audience.AudienceJob].Assembly.GetType("Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy"))
$applicationId = $proxy.GetType().GetProperty("UserProfileApplication", [System.Reflection.BindingFlags]"NonPublic, Instance").GetValue($proxy, $null).Id.Guid
[Array]$args = $applicationId, "1", "0", $audience
[int]$runjob = [Microsoft.Office.Server.Audience.AudienceJob]::RunAudienceJob($args)
$site.Dispose()

(For an explanation of $args in that PowerShell snippet, see the C# example.)