WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )

re: WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )

Andrew Macaroon — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:21:42 GMT

Hi James,

interesting post, it's good to see PowerShell expanding in features and capabilities.

It's also a good example of why I find PowerShell pretty annoying. You've given three completely different ways of doing something, two of which aren't in the least bit intuitive and the easiest of them doesn't work.

When I paste the example above into gPowerShell and hit F5 it fails, with the error "the calling thread must be STA, because many UI components require this". No doubt I've omitted some 'obvious' step such as manually setting my default gPowerShell Thursday execution policy to be green.

I'm not even going to bother with the other two methods as no doubt some other mysterious setting needs to be changed from it's default for these to work properly.

This is just a general example of why I find PowerShell absolutely exasperating. There seem to be many, many ways of doing the same task, most of which have some undocumented 'miracle happens here' step completely unrelated to the task at hand. ("You want to display a window? Make sure you change the environment threading model first!" WTF??) How are we supposed to establish best practice and create re-usable code with such a profusion of approaches and convoluted mechanisms of making them run?

Another bug-bear is ADSI, which I spend quite a bit of my time (normally) coding with VBScript. I've tried to convert to PowerShell but good grief it's an irritating experience.

Yesterday, for example, I spent ages wrestling with a bit of pipeline code to show a table of people who had non-default mailbox size limits. Doing the search went fine, and using (an entirely non-obvious) bit of code from the internet I got it into a table.

I then wanted to show the output in MB instead so did a ' / 1MB'; did it work? "no division operator for property result set". So, convert it a string then do it (as there's no toInt() function I take a guess it might implicitly convert a string, like it would in VBScript). Still doesn't work, "no division operator for string". Cast it to an int, still doesn't work, it tries to cast the propertyresult to an int before running the .toString(), not after, and fails "can't convert propertyresult to int". Try putting brackets round the blah.ToString(), to force it to run first. Fails. Give up. Resort to copying it out from the screen and pasting it into Excel and converting it there. Rubbish.

Rant over, and apologies for straying way off topic here (and directing this rant at you). I do appreciate all the effort the PowerShell guys are making to evangelise and give examples of PowerShell at work. I'm just finding it too hard to translate the stuff I do into the PowerShell way; the balance between "effort required to make it work" versus "benefits of migrating from VBScript" to my mind isn't tipped in the right direction.

Dew Drop - May 22, 2008 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew

Dew Drop - May 22, 2008 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:27:17 GMT

PingBack from http://www.alvinashcraft.com/2008/05/22/dew-drop-may-22-2008/

re: WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )

Pepper Pots — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:06:08 GMT

Aren't these precisely the low-level details that are supposed to be encapsulated within cmdlets? This isn't that much easier than just doing it in C#. I agree that it's cool to be able to do it, and I liked the article and will certainly read the rest in the series, but I doubt any of this will help to spread adoption of PowerShell among those new to it, and might even turn some of them off. I wish Microsoft would spend more time fixing known bugs than packing in new features that will be very rarely used. How about allowing PowerShell scripts to be directly pushed out through Group Policy without a VBScript wrapper? Or adding Active Directory cmdlets that work? Or supporting long file paths? Or making the SQL cmdlets better? Or adding support for VBScript's GetObject() method? Or getting PowerShell to work on Server Core? Or making powershell.exe launch as quickly as cmd.exe?

@Andrew Macaroon

Marco Shaw — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:52:54 GMT

Andrew,

Please detail your problems, then we can help you, and maybe help others who come along with the same issue.

As an MVP, we tend to not always be in touch with the troubles newcomers can face, as things have changed even as of 12 months ago.

As for the STA/gPowerShell problem... You are running v2 CTP2 right? v2 CTP1's gPowerShell doesn't support STA mode.

@ Anderw Macaroon (part 2)

Marco Shaw — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:01:33 GMT

Andrew,

As for the "having multiple ways to do the same thing"...

All the methods are quite different and serve their own purpose.

For a typicaly admin, the command-line method would likely be choice #1. #2 can be used to actually test/develop the script by an admin, before ones copies it into a script to be run by powershell.exe.

Option #3 is more geared for developers who could be using PowerShell *inside* their applications.

More PoSHy WPF from PowerShell coverage

The PowerShell Guy — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:12:11 GMT

Now also James Brundage from the PowerShell team started a series on WPF from PowerShell, Starting with

re: WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )

Richard Siddaway — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:53:43 GMT

I like this - look forward to the other articles.

Shouldn't the New-Runspace (and other runspace) cmdlets be expanded to cover the use of a runspace in your third example

Windows Presentation Foundation & PowerShell

The Medical Quack .... by Barbara Duck — Fri, 23 May 2008 00:27:29 GMT

Hard Hat Area: Programmers.... Server 2008 tidbit.... PowerShell...create some real nice user interfaces

re: WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )

caywen — Fri, 23 May 2008 01:30:45 GMT

Ugh, I could make a peanut butter and squid sandwich, but that doesn't mean you should.

re: WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )

Pablo — Fri, 23 May 2008 12:28:17 GMT

Interesting post but we have a simple question... how can we do to run a powershell script that shows for example a form with some controls but without the black console window in the background? how can we hide the black console window? Is it possible?

@ Richard Siddaway

Marco Shaw — Fri, 23 May 2008 16:25:57 GMT

Richard,

new-runspace/start-psjob only support the MTA threading model/state.

So, one can't use these and have WPF behave correctly in all circumstances.

re: WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )

Dan — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:25:44 GMT

This is only meant to be MILDLY snarky.

Thanks, just what I need, seven days of examples of how to use BETA code. I live in a production world. When will the new version ship?

re: WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )

PowerShellTeam — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:42:59 GMT

> This is only meant to be MILDLY snarky.

"Snarky" - what a GREAT word. I just love that word.

> Thanks, just what I need, seven days of examples of how to use BETA code. I live in a production world. When will the new version ship?

It's worse than that my friend. This is not BETA code, its CTP code. That's a LONG way away from Beta. V2 is a huge (compatible) release with lots of new features and we need to promulgate those features to our early adopters so they can kick the tires and tell us if we got it right, almost right, or our heads are in the wrong place of our anatomy.

YOU benefit from this because at some point we'll ship these features and the feedback from our early adopters hopefully acts as a proxy for your needs and you get what you want without having to take the production code, file a bunch of bugs/feature requests and wait a couple of years to get them addressed.

Of course if these early adopters don't reflect your needs, you're screwed. You might want to think about that when deciding whether to blow of the CTP or not.

This blog is going to have a content for both existing and new stuff but is probably going to lean towards the newer stuff because we want people to use it and give us feedback. That might mean that our signal-to-noise ratio is wrong for you until we ship V2. That's fine - no harm/no foul - we'll enjoy your company when you join us again.

So - when will the new version ship? Here is the deal: We were only given permission to have a CTP if we promised never to answer that question. That said, here is what I can say. We are coding new features for a couple more weeks and then it has typically taken us a year plus or minus a quarter to bake the release to the point that customers tell us it is ready to ship.

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

Windows Management Partner Architect

Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell

Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx

re: WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )

Dan — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:57:15 GMT

Jeffrey,

Thanks. I really appreciate your answer. And I really appreciate PS. I had been doing most of my work in Perl and I am very happy to move to this new tool. I see PS as being a seriously big deal for me, I just can't get involved in development code right now.

Thanks again.

@ Pablo

Marco Shaw — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:07:23 GMT

Pablo,

You want to get rid of the PowerShell console? Can you be more specific?

re: WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )

Pablo — Sat, 24 May 2008 00:26:06 GMT

The questions is that I can't execute a powershell script without the black console window. For example when I run a vbs script, we only need to run the command: wscript.exe example.vbs and this command do not open a cmd console :-)

Another example. Look my example.ps1 script:

[void] [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Drawing")

[void] [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms")

$objForm = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Form

$objForm.Text = "Example"

$objForm.Size = New-Object System.Drawing.Size(100,100)

$objForm.StartPosition = "CenterScreen"

$objForm.Add_Shown({$objForm.Activate()})

[void] $objForm.ShowDialog()

when I run this script: powershell.exe .\example.ps1 the windows form appears correctly but I can´t hide the powershell console. How can I do?

@ Pablo

Marco Shaw — Mon, 26 May 2008 03:54:27 GMT

Pablo,

Ah yes, the annoying black widow... ;-)

I've tried posting URLs in the comments before and they seem to always be rejected. I'd go to the microsoft.public.windows.powershell newsgroup and ask...

re: WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )

PowerShellTeam — Mon, 26 May 2008 04:44:58 GMT

I'll include this in a later post in the series, but I'll post it here for Pablo. You can Minimize /Maximize Powershell by calling Win32 Functions through C interop:

$showWindowAsync = Add-Type –memberDefintion @”

[DllImport("user32.dll")]

public static extern bool ShowWindowAsync(IntPtr hWnd, int nCmdShow);

“@ -name “Win32ShowWindowAsync” -namespace Win32Functions –passThru

# Minimize PowerShell

$showWindowAsync::ShowWindowAsync((Get-Process –id $pid).MainWindowHandle, 2)

sleep 2

# Then Restore it

$showWindowAsync::ShowWindowAsync((Get-Process –id $pid).MainWindowHandle, 4)

Hope this Helps,

James Brundage[MSFT]

re: WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )

Smith Catar — Mon, 26 May 2008 08:25:26 GMT

Great! It is what I surely hoped.

But I hope -Minimize and -NoWindow start options for powershell.exe, too.

Are they shipping on next milestone? Or will ship?

re: WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )

Pablo — Mon, 26 May 2008 14:48:51 GMT

@PowerShellTeam

Thanks. Interesting workaround :-) I'll try it. It will be very interesting for IT Administrators that we can hide the console completely (if the black window is minimized the final user can close it). Thanks again for the help.

Visual Studio Links #32

Visual Studio Hacks — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:57:52 GMT

My latest in a series of the weekly, or more often, summary of interesting links I come across related to Visual Studio. JetBrains has announced the release of the ReSharper 4.0 Beta . Hilton Giesenow has created a video titled How Do I: Add A Dialog

re: WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )

Gianluca — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:35:45 GMT

I`ve just tried your code on PS V2 CTP Graphical and I`ve received an exception:

Exception calling ".ctor" with "0" argument(s): "The calling thread must be STA, because many UI components require this"

So probably there is something to tune in runspace.

The only change I`ve made to standard PS Runspace is

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

Regards,

Gianluca

@ Gianluca

Marco Shaw — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:23:57 GMT

Gianluca,

You must be running the v2 CTP2 gPowerShell. A v2 CTP was release also, but it doesn't support STA. I'm assuming the problem is that you're running an old CTP version.

@Marco

Gianluca — Thu, 29 May 2008 15:57:02 GMT

You are right!

I`ve missed the CTP2 release announce, sorry.

Just downloaded, thanks.

Shame on most of us out there

It's my life... And I live it... — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 08:08:36 GMT

Lee and Suzanne here makes a good point. Shame on all of us for not at least acknowledging that this