PowerShell ShowUI Walkthrough

Another snapshot for a great read. Winforms was the dominant .NET approach for PowerShellers to create robust GUIs in Windows without relying on the older VBScript/shell models. As the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) began to gain a foothold, however, folks adopted it as a way to generate interfaces. The problem with WPF is the syntax for forms is very chatty and non-intuitive. Granted, Winforms was not the most intuitive thing in the world, but, when compared to each other Winforms and WPF are night and day.

WPF is an XML-rich language used to build forms in .NET and has tremendous capabilities. As a matter of fact, I have only recently started to move in that direction with a $7.99 special from Half Price Books last week. For anyone moving into Windows with an interest in doing more than pure shell-driven development (i.e., anyone using Windows 7/2008 forward) WPF is a necessary evil. So, why not give it a shot. To make things more interesting, there are some really great resources out there online already to help automate the generation of such forms. One such resource is the ShowUI module on Codeplex led by James Brundage, Doug Finke and Jaykul (Joel Bennett). In the link below, Joel outlines some key, hello world type examples.

In describing ShowUI, Joel writes,

ShowUI is the next generation PowerShell module for building user interfaces in script. It’s the merger of my previous PowerShell UI project (called PowerBoots) with one by James Brundage, former Microsoft PowerShell team member and founder of Start-Automating (called WPK) which shipped in the Windows 7 resource kit.

For further exploration, visit Start-Automatings site and watch this tutorial video:

ShowUI is the way you can write rich client WPF applications in Windows PowerShell. 

Aside from Joel and James, there are plenty of folks actively working the WPF angle. Recent blog posts on Boe Proxs blog touch on some excellent, in-depth usage of WPF:

http://learn-powershell.net/author/boeprox/

So, if you are into PowerShell for the long haul and will be developing GUI-based scripts, it may be time to visit Amazons used books and see what you can track down.

 

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