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I have a situation which I need some help with.

I'm running an Azure build pipeline on microsoft hosted private VM with quite a old build program/IDE which does not have any CLI. So I have to start the program and then press a key (F10) to start the build, right now i'm using Powershell for this.

I have issues though to get this to work on the VM when I have disconnected RDP, almost always (not 100%) when I have rdp open my script works and set focus to the program and presses the key. But sometimes it doesn´t work, and it seems to always fail when the rdp is disconnected. My build fails and when I connect with RDP the window is just grey:d out and it hasn't registered any keypress.

I have found some similar threads which seems to touch upon the issue, but not any solution for Powershell.

Setting focus to window in a virtual machine

Sendkeys On Disconnected RDP Session

One solution seems to be to redirect standard input to the started program which means we don't have to care about focusing the window, but how do I redirect a keypress to a started process with Powershell? (Any other scripting language available in azure pipelines yaml is also ok)

The best solution so far has been

param
(
    [string]$appName,
    [string]$key
)

$objShell = New-Object -ComObject wscript.shell
$proc = Get-Process $appName
$objShell.AppActivate($proc.Id)
Start-Sleep -Seconds 1
$keyString = "'{" + $key + "}'"
$objShell.SendKeys($keyString)

But as stated, this seems to only work when I have an active RDP connection (and not 100% of the time). I have also tried using SetForegroundWindow which works fine when I run the script on my own computer but not on the VM.

Many thanks Carl

Carl
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  • You could try to add a `Bash task` before `Powershel`l task to run the script `START C:\Windows\System32\tscon.exe %sessionname% /dest:console`. Could you check if it could make some changes? You could refer to these two tickets: [ticket1](https://superuser.com/questions/80334/remote-desktop-connection-without-locking-the-remote-computer?rq=1) and [ticket2](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16102789/automated-send-keys-failing-when-no-rdp) – Kevin Lu-MSFT Oct 22 '20 at 07:14
  • I actually got it working but using the solution in "ticket2" :) I created a "logoff" bat file which I run to shut down the rdp, then all my scripts run as I want to :) – Carl Nov 10 '20 at 12:47

0 Answers0