A nifty trick that you can do in WPK is create a WPF progress bar to show the Write-Progress output from a PowerShell script.  I was reminded that people actually wanted to do this when I ran across a question on StackOverflow, and posted this answer.

In case you don’t want to follow the link, here’s a quick script to show progress from a background runspace in WPK.  The top half set ups a bunch of data bindings that will bind to whatever DataContext is found, and the second half of the script is a small sample of Write-Progress output.

New-Grid -Columns 2 {            
    New-TextBlock -Margin 10 -TextWrapping Wrap -ZIndex 1 -HorizontalAlignment Left -FontWeight Bold -FontSize 12 -DataBinding @{            
        "Text" = "LastProgress.Activity"            
    }            
    New-TextBlock -Margin 10 -ZIndex 1 -TextWrapping Wrap -Column 1 -VerticalAlignment Bottom -HorizontalAlignment Right -FontStyle Italic -FontSize 12 -DataBinding @{            
        "Text" = "LastProgress.StatusDescription"            
    }            
    New-ProgressBar -ColumnSpan 2 -MinHeight 250 -Name ProgressPercent -DataBinding @{            
        "Value" = "LastProgress.PercentComplete"            
    }            
} -DataContext {            
    Get-PowerShellDataSource -Script {             
        foreach ($n in 1..100) {            
            Write-Progress "MajorProgress" "MinorProgress" -PercentComplete $n            
            Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 250            
        }            
    }            
} -AsJob            

Hope this Helps

James Brundage [MSFT]