This post is part of the Learning GUI Toolmaking Series, here on FoxDeploy. Click the banner to return to the series jump page!

Where we left off

Thanks for joining us again!  Previously in this series, we learned all about writing fully-fledged applications, in Posts 1, 2 and 3. Then, we learned some techniques to keeping our apps responsive in Post 4.

In this post, I’ll walk you through my GUI design process, and share how that actually worked as I sought to create my newest tool.

Along the way, I’ll call out a few really confusing bugs that I worked through in creating this tool, and explain what went wrong. In particular, I ran into quite a snag when trying to programmatically create event handlers in code when trying to use $psitem  or $_. This lead to many conversations which introduced me to a powerful solution: the $this variable.

What is the tool?

Introducing the FoxDeploy DSC Designer.

Think something sort of like the Group Policy Management Console, for your DSC Configurations. But we’ll get back to this in a few minutes.

My GUI Design Process

Here’s my general process for designing a front-end:

• Create the elevator pitch (Why does this need to exist?)
• Draw out a rough design
• Make it work in code
• Add feature by feature to the front end
• Release
• Iterate

It all started with me taking a trip to Microsoft last year for the MVP Summit.  I’d been kicking around my elevator pitch idea for a while now, and was waiting to spring it on an unwary Microsoft Employee, hoping to con them into making it for me:

Here’s my elevator pitch

To drive adoption of DSC, we need some tooling. First, we need a GUI which lists all the DSC resources on a machine and provides a Group Policy Management Console like experience for making DSC configs.

We want to make DSC easier to work with, so its not all native text.

I decided to spring this on Hemanth Manawar of the PowerShell team, since I had him captive in a room.  He listened, looked at my sketches, and then said basically this:

‘You’re right, someone should make this…why not you?’

Thanks guys.  thanks

So I got started doing it on my own.  With step one of the design process –elevator pitch– out of the way, I moved on to the next phase.

Time to draw a Rough Draft of the UX

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This post is part of the Learning GUI Toolmaking Series, here on FoxDeploy. Click the banner to return to the series jump page!

Where we left off

Previously in Part III of our GUI series, we left off with a review of some advanced GUI options, things like radio buttons, text replacement and things like that. In this section, we’ll grow our tool from Part I, our lowly Ping tool, and expand it to become a fully-fledged remote PC management tool. We’ll do this to learn our way through some new GUI concepts we haven’t run into before. I’ll take you through making most of this tool, and leave you at a place where you should be able to take it the rest of the way.

What we’ll cover

If you walk through this guide, I guarantee that we’ll cover each of these items below. If there is something you’d like to see covered in a future post, send me an e-mail! Each of the items covered in this post came from requests from my readers.

Seriously.

I am gathering input for post five right now, so let me know what’d you’d like to do with PowerShell, and we can make it happen.

Making a Tabbed Interface

We’re going to talk about the right way to use this element, to make it obvious to users (something called ‘Discoverability’) that more tools and options exist, if they’d only click this tab and explore around a bit! In tab one, we’ll drop in the whole of our pinging tool from Part I of this walkthrough, while we’ll hide extra functionality in tabs two, three and four. For extra niftiness, we’ll have the others tabs be disabled (unclickable) until the user first verifies that a PC is online in tab one.

Handling UI Events

This is the part that has me the most excited, mostly because I just learned about how to do it, and it solves so many issues. Want to have your GUI run a chunk of code when the user edits a textBox. Or handle the event which is triggered if the user moves the mouse over a button? We can even wait till the user is finished entering text, and then run a short chunk of code to validate an entry. These are all real world scenarios for a User Interface Developer, and we can easily deal with them in PowerShell.

Let’s get started.

Tabs, not just for playing ‘The house of the rising sun’

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This post is part of the Learning GUI Toolmaking Series, here on FoxDeploy. Click the banner to return to the series jump page!

“I’ll never do it the old way again. EVER. ”
-me

If you’ve been following my blog for any time, you’ll know that I love making tools using PowerShell.

I’ve written on the topic previously, and the approach I took then were based off of using the .net System.Windows.Forms class which really meant that you had to painfully, agonizingly create a GUI one element at a time.   I knew there were other methods, using something scary called XAML, and I’d even seen other’s tutorials, but frankly thought it looked too hard.

So I stuck with the pulling teeth method for years.  Until one day, I had some spare time and thought I’d take a look at the other GUI design method again…

I wish I had sooner, because it is so EASY!

What You’ll Need:

• Visual Studio.  I’m using Community Tech Preview 2015, but you can do this with Visual Studio Express too. Get it here 
• A bit of helper PowerShell code, inspired by the awesome Chris Conte in this guest post on The Scripting Guy blog.  I’ll provide the snippet we need, when we need it.

Getting Visual Studio is easy, just download either the CTP edition or the trial of Ultimate.  There are ways of getting it for free too, via DreamSpark, MSDN, MVP Access or you can always use Express.  Assuming you’ve been able to install Visual Studio… Continue reading →