Research Triangle PowerShell Users Group Tools for Automation, 30 Nov 2020

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From YouTube: PowerShell Lightning Talk: Advanced Toast Notifications in PowerShell (Josh King)

Description

Josh King shows how he was able to develop advanced actions for his PowerShell Toast notifications. Not familiar with toast notifications? Josh has built a PowerShell module that allows you to send a windows notification using PowerShell. Josh has taken this to the next level and shares some interesting ways to leverage toast notifications to execute code for you.

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So I'm josh king um I'm gonna, fly through this real, quick, um or at least I hope to so. If you've got any questions reach out to me on twitter, at windows, nz.

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um So my sort of thing uh toast notifications, uh I've got a module out there called burnt toast, but the bane of my existence with that at the moment is they're sort of useless.

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So at the moment you can show information and you can do click actions and buttons, but all you can really do with those at the moment is open files or snooze and dismiss so in this case I click picture. It'll load, my work, my work headshot.

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So that's all well and good, so you can use it for things like I've generated the report, I've saved it to disk hey now, instead of finding it click the button to open it up.

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What would be really cool is if I could trigger some sort of powershell action based on those buttons or those click actions.

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So this dives into the weeds a bit, but behind the scenes with toast, it's just an xml string to build it up and there's a whole bunch of stuff that happens, but.

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Select everything that I need. What did that complain about? Perhaps if I select everything.

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But what I'm really interested in is the toast type has events on them. So in theory, you should be able to subscribe to an activated, um an activated event dismissed event or you tried to show the toast and it completely failed.

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So what you would normally do is register an object event, the object being your toast and the event name being one of the ones from this list and for this example I just say: hey: I've got a folder. I've got a file in there and I want to output the date into that whenever I action whenever I activate the toast.

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When I go and run that very quickly find out that windows, powershell can't subscribe to windows, rt events and just to show that toast does work and clicking it doesn't do anything.

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You'll notice that error message does specifically call out windows powershell, so for completeness.

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Sake: let's try powershell 7.

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Still get the toast clicking, it doesn't do anything because powershell can't subscribe to 1rt events.

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So that's a real pain.

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Had people suggest um uri protocol handlers and I've finally had a chance to look at them and the end result is this: I run this notif uh run this toast. I can see a notification pops up telling me that my wallpaper is boring and it is a bit it's grey and geometric in that, and I can pick a new one. So let's say I want raw.

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You would have seen a console pop up there and my wallpaper's changed.

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If I run it again and say, eggs console pops up really quick.

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My wallpaper changes eventually and now I have eggs.

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The code behind all of this is a registry setting.

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And I'll give this all to the guys to post up on github, but it's setting a value in um in the registry with a custom name, so I called it toastps and then you tell it to run a command you'll notice. It's calling a cmd file and that.

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Really doesn't look nice in there it's running.

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A cmd file and unfortunately, I haven't been able to get it to go directly to a ps1 file.

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um So we use cmd as a middleman at the moment, and all it's doing is calling uh powershell exe and passing in the file that I want to the file that I want to run, which is my change wallpaper and uh the arguments, which is how? Then I choose which which wallpaper to change to that change.

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Wallpaper has a large function that I borrowed from that url.

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um And I'm taking the arguments which uh here so.

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Toast ps eggs, toast ps heart, toast, ps raw.

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Grabbing just the wallpaper name because they what's passed in as an argument includes toast ps and the colon, and then I call the function specifying the wallpaper so just to show that one more time. Oh this time, I'll click, the heart button, which is passing through an argument called toastps heart.

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Runs there, it goes through the command. It goes through the cmd file and changes. My wallpaper.

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At that point, you can do almost anything you want with um with your notifications, so I'm you can expect a uh a blog post about it at some stage, because this is finally unlocks the potential of those toast notifications. I've been doing for years.

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That is super cool, super super cool yeah and then.

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Sorry, the um the button my first button, you'll notice the argument here where it was toast psx on that first one where I'm launching a picture the argument there is the path to the picture. So that's the that's the change. As far as the end user is concerned,.