Question

Is it possible to use a Windows 7 TaskDialog in PowerShell?

I’d like to convert the following messagebox to a TaskDialog:

[System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox]::Show(
    "There are currently one or more Microsoft Office applications running.`n`nYou must close down all open Office applications before the template update can continue.", 
    "Updating Templates", 
    [System.Windows.Forms.MessageBoxButtons]::RetryCancel, 
    [System.Windows.Forms.MessageBoxIcon]::Warning )

Anyone know how/if this can be done?

Thanks,

Ben

Answer 1

You need to use Microsoft’s Windows API CodePack for this, it’s very simple, but although it will work fine from PowerShell ISE, PoshConsole, PowerGUI etc — I don’t believe it will work in PowerShell.exe because the console loads the wrong version of comctl32.dll (the common controls library).

# import the library dll from wherever you put it:
add-type -path .\Libraries\Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.dll

# Create and configure the TaskDialog
$td = New-Object Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.Dialogs.TaskDialog
$td.Caption = "Updating Templates"
$td.Text = "There are currently one or more Microsoft Office applications running.`n`nYou must close down all open Office applications before the template update can continue."
$td.StandardButtons = "Retry,Cancel"
$td.Icon = "Warning"

# Show the dialog and capture the resulting choice
$result = $td.Show()  # will return either "Retry" or "Cancel" 

Hopefully it’s obvious that the $result value is actually an enumeration value (of type [Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.Dialogs.TaskDialogResult]) … but in PowerShell you can basically treat it as a string or an int if you like.

Of course, this is barely scratching the surface of what you can do with a TaskDialog — if you use it with just this code, it will look and behave very similarly to your current dialog — but you can explore the other possibilities yourself — I can recommend the TaskDialog builder tool from this MSDN Magazine Article as a way to learn the many options.