Get Startedįirst of all, you need a Forms editor. Therefore its important hat you get familiar with the way information is displayed there.

Its a good resource and helpful in order to bring Windows Forms to its full potential. I encourage you to take a moment and skim through the list of events for the button object in the MSDN library. Obvious ones, like a left mouse click on a button or a text was entered in a textbox, but also some not so obvious ones. And to configure if and what the script should do when something happens, that’s what events are for.Įach element has a lot of events for all kinds of things. It waits that somebody clicks on a button, enters a text, whatever. That means, after you created your window, placed your buttons, labels and other elements and run the whole thing, it just sits there and waits for something to happen. The methods of these objects you will use rather seldom, but there are some other things you can configure in the editor and these you will use constantly: events. Most of these properties you can set or change in the Forms editor (we will get to that later). And as you know, each object has a set of properties and methods.Ī button for example has properties for it’s size, location, text, color and a lot more. Well, WinForms GUI elements are also objects. If you have been using Powershell for at least a little while, you should be used to working with objects. So for this and the upcoming articles, we will focus on WinForms. But for the purpose of creating a GUI for your administrative script or a nice and convenient little tool for your users, WinForms will do just fine: You usually won’t have the time to create a fancy design anyway and if you really want to, you can do a few nice things with WinForms too. That’s a huge advantage, because you simply click your GUI-elements together and immediately get your ready-to-use Powershell code. And for WinForms, there are WYSIWYG-Editors available, which generate native Powershell code. With WPF you got the full freedom of design, but the downside is that it’s way more complicated to use than WinForms, especially for beginners.

The practical differences however, are that with Windows Forms you will use the native Windows interface elements and you will have only limited control on how things will look like. I wont bother you with the technical differences (they are well explained here if you’re interested). You can either use Windows Forms (WinForms) or Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). If you want to create a GUI for your Powershell script, you’ve got two options.

Primalforms community edition tutorial