Gav's Blog – SharePoint .NET & Tech

I was trying to use the design manager features today and ran into this on my dev server. I’d copied the short cut from the screen and pasted it into the map network folder dialog and got this:

If you’re trying to do this from Server 2008 R2 you’ll need to do a simple piece of config first; Simply go and add the Desktop Experience Feature and reboot your server!

A nice and easy fix

Also make sure you use the http:// path and not the file:// path that you’ll get with right click > copy shortcut

Today I needed to add a wait into a Powershell script, given that is a point where the user running the script needs to go do some manual steps on another server I thought it might be a good idea to wait for a specific key press. So off to Bing I go…

There are plenty of great articles on waiting for or getting user input, personally I really like Windows PowerShell Tip of the Week: Pausing a Script Until the User Presses a Key and the User Interaction chapter from the PowerShell Cookbook. After seeing that [Console]::ReadKey() would give me an object which told me about the modifers on the key press (Crtl, Alt and/or Shift) I started thinking about making that key press more specific, say Ctrl + G, so I wrote a function to handle this:

function Pause
{
	param([string] $pauseKey,
			[ConsoleModifiers] $modifier,
			[string] $prompt,
			[bool] $hideKeysStrokes)
			
    Write-Host -NoNewLine "Press $prompt to continue . . . "
    do
	{
		$key = [Console]::ReadKey($hideKeysStrokes)
	} 
	while(($key.Key -ne $pauseKey) -or ($key.Modifiers -ne $modifer))	
	
    Write-Host
}

This function received a bit of inspiration from How to Properly Pause a PowerShell Script which itself is pretty interesting.

Things to note:

Ctrl + C will still cancel the script, you’ll need to use $host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey with the AllowCtrlC option to prevent that, but then accessing the Modifiers is done differently.

$modifers is a simple enum value of ConsoleModifiers if you want to do combinations like Atl+Shift you’ll pass a collection of modifers and do –band operations to see if your conditions are met.

To call the Pause function use something like this:

$modifer = [ConsoleModifiers]::Control
Pause "G" $modifer "Ctrl + G" $true  

And then you’ll see this: