Powershell GUI

This is a complex topic I'm afraid. To be honest, every time I've done this I've ended up shifting to C#. PowerShell is not the best language for creating user interfaces.

You might consider using ShowUI, it significantly simplifies the job of building the GUI:

http://www.show-ui.com/

If you do, you will also have to distribute the ShowUI to helpdesk staff.

i hope this below will help

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/csps/2011/12/07/creating-your-own-gui-application/

Fairly straight forward. You can also use Visual Studio to design GUI and just use it in Powershell with a couple of tweaks

function Load-Form {
    $Form.Controls.Add($Button1)
    $Form.Controls.Add($Label)
    $Form.Add_Shown({$Form.Activate()})
	[void]$Form.ShowDialog()
}

Function ButtonWasClicked{

}

# Form
$Form = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Form    
$Form.Size = New-Object System.Drawing.Size(900,450)  
$Form.MinimumSize = New-Object System.Drawing.Size(900,450)
$Form.MaximumSize = New-Object System.Drawing.Size(900,450)
$Form.SizeGripStyle = "Hide"
$Form.Icon = [System.Drawing.Icon]::ExtractAssociatedIcon($PSHome + "\powershell.exe")
$Form.Text = "Title"
$Form.ControlBox = $true
$Form.TopMost = $true

#Draw buttons 
$Button1 = new-object System.Windows.Forms.Button
$Button1.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(60,370)
$Button1.Size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(90,25)
$Button1.Text = "Click here..."
$Button1.Add_Click({ButtonWasClicked})
$Button1.Visible = $True
$Button1.Enabled = $False
$Label = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Label
$Label.Text = ""
$Label.AutoSize = $True
$Label.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(160,375)

# Load form
Load-Form

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Sapien makes a good GUI IDE for Powershell scripts.

I thought Sapien discontinued primal forms? Certainly not kicking around much any more.

I think I should clarify this statement:

> This is a complex topic I'm afraid.

Designing the initial front end with a few buttons is easy. Wiring up the back end, so you can execute things, get information back, properly handle errors and exceptions, present information, act on it, all of this takes a lot of time. This is especially true when you're dealing with longer running tasks that must trigger a change in a UI-thread when they're done (without completely locking up the GUI for the duration).

I will hold fast to my opinion that PowerShell is not a good language for developing GUIs. You can... but outside of very, very simple utilities it becomes quite a drag.

ShowUI goes a long way to mitigating this lack by providing a background jobs interface, my last project couldn't use that because it auto-builds itself on first import and every import was a first in the environment in question.

https://www.sapien.com/software/powershell_studio

still lists GUI Designer as a prominent feature.

I won't pay $389 for something I can do in Community VS/Notepad++ though

A decent example of a Powershell UI via forms in this solution to a prior problem, hope it's helpful.

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/28982303/Help-to-convert-powershell-script-into-a-gui.html?anchorAnswerId=41884032#a41884032

~bp

PrimalForms was free way back when. It was all Forms though. Being able to "draw" most of the GUI in a XAML document is quite an advantage (over dynamically generating every single control) with WPF.

As Shaun says, VS community is free and it has a forms designer. It could be used to build up the main GUI part.

Beyond that I think you should break this problem down. If you must have a GUI, what should the minimum viable product include?

If you take this part as an example:

> The GUI will grab information, example -  mailbox sizes greater than 5 gb

This means you need to execute some PowerShell, and you need to display the results.

How should that be displayed? In a list?

> The GUI will have a button to migrate the mailbox

This control will have to be dynamically generated.

Where will the button appear? How will it be generated? What, exactly, will it do?

I am using wpf to build the gui, what are your thoughts? is there a better way??