Gav's Blog – Tech Adventures

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:

Well that was fun!

I had a real blast co-presesnting that session with Chris. As promised I have a bunch of resources for you to download and peruse.

Disabling Mobile Re-direction via PowerShell

Hmmm, apparently WordPress won’t let me host any useful file formats in my site (not even plain .txt files!!!) so sorry…. My plans of giving you folks full Visual Studio solutions as zip files has been foiled! I’ll work out a cunning plan to get around this later.

In the meantime:

The custom re-director I showed off was based off this MSDN article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms441925.aspx. Essentially you should:

• Create a mapped folder in you SharePoint Solution, mapping it to 14HIVE\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\MOBILE
• Into this add your own custom aspx page that inherits from Microsoft.SharePoint.MobileRedirection.SPMobilePage
• Override the OnInit method to provide your custom redirection
• Create a copy of the existing mbllists.aspx as mbllists.old.aspx, or similar
• Replace the existing mbllists.aspx with your own custom page that contains:

<SPMobile:SPMobileForm RunAt="Server" PageType="HomePage" Paginate="true">
	<SPMobile:SPMobileHomePageRedirection ID="SPMobileHomePageRedirection1" RunAt="Server" 
    PageFileName="CustomMobileRedirect.aspx" />
</SPMobile:SPMobileForm>

• Deploy the solution

The HttpHandler that I used to trick SharePoint into not re-directing I sourced from the blog of Waldek Mastykarz: http://blog.mastykarz.nl/inconvenient-sharepoint-2010-mobile-redirect/.

I then coupled it with a really simple webpart that contained the following code.

using System;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;

namespace VariationsRedirector.RedirectWebPart
{
    [ToolboxItemAttribute(false)]
    public class RedirectWebPart : WebPart
    {
        protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e)
        {
            if (Page.Request.Browser.IsMobileDevice)
            {
                string mobileUrl = GetMobileSiteUrl();
                Page.Response.Redirect(mobileUrl);
            }
            base.OnInit(e);
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Gets the Mobile URL form the config settings list if it exists
        /// </summary>
        /// <returns>The mobile URL</returns>
        private string GetMobileSiteUrl()
        {
            //This is just hard coded to change the URL of the current request,
            //swaping the mobile variation label for the www variation label, 
            //hey, it's demo code...
            string mobileUrl = Page.Request.Url.ToString().ToLower().Replace("/www/", "/mobile/");
            return mobileUrl;
        }
    }
}

Many thanks to the Conference team for allowing me to present and to all of you that came along to my session
Feel free to reach out to either Chris of myself if you have any further queries 🙂