Powershell notifications with Windows Forms

What do we get more than anything, notifications. I'm a fan of turning them off (when I can), but if you wanted to show notifications through Powershell, here's a way how to do that.

A notification in Windows 10

Adding Windows Forms

We are going to leverage the NotifyIcon class built into Windows Forms in order to display our notification in Powershell. This is possible through the Add-Type cmdlet available in Powershell.

With the Add-Type cmdlet, we can add the Windows.Forms assembly directly into our Powershell instance and use types like we would in code. This can be done with the following code.

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms

Once this assembly is loaded into memory, we can begin to set the properties of the NotifyIcon and display it from Powershell.

Setting the properties

Before we set the properties on our notification, we need to create a NotifyIcon first. This can be done with the New-Object cmdlet.

$notification = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon

We are storing a reference of the object in a variable so that we can set properties on our NotifyIcon.

We can now set all of the properties we need for our notification.

$path = (Get-Process -id $pid).Path
$notification.Icon = [System.Drawing.Icon]::ExtractAssociatedIcon($path) 
$notification.BalloonTipIcon = [System.Windows.Forms.ToolTipIcon]::Error 
$notification.BalloonTipText = "A Powershell error, oh no!!"
$notification.BalloonTipTitle = "ERROR"
$notification.Visible = $true 
$notification.ShowBalloonTip(3000)

The Icon grabs the image for the Powershell application. The BalloonTipIcon is the icon associated with the notification (using any valid value from the ToolTipIcon enumeration). The text and title are pretty self-explanatory. We also ensure the NotifyIcon is visible and is visible for 3 seconds (3000 miliseconds).

This is what our notification looks like.

Our Powershell error

Small notes

I wanted to call out two pieces of the above script which justify a little more explanation. First is the code that is returning the icon of the notification. You will notice above that we are calling Get-Process to pull the path of the current process. The $pid is an automatic variable that automatically is the value of the current process of the executing Powershell session. 

When we use the path of the current executing Powershell session (which for me happens to be "C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe"), we are using it to call a static method on the System.Drawing.Icon class. In Powershell, when we encounter square brackets around a variable, Powershell knows that this variable is a .NET class and interprets as such. The two colons after the brackets indicate we are calling a static method, ExtractAssociatedIcon.

Full script

The full script is below, with additional comments. Enjoy!

# Add the Windows.Forms assembly
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms 

# Create an object to hold a reference to a NotifyIcon
$notification = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon

# Set the icon of the notification
$path = (Get-Process -id $pid).Path
$notification.Icon = [System.Drawing.Icon]::ExtractAssociatedIcon($path) 

# Set the balloon icon
$notification.BalloonTipIcon = [System.Windows.Forms.ToolTipIcon]::Error 

# Set the text & title
$notification.BalloonTipText = "A Powershell error, oh no!!"
$notification.BalloonTipTitle = "ERROR"

# Ensure this notification is visible
$notification.Visible = $true 

# Show the notification for 3 (3000 miliseconds) seconds
$notification.ShowBalloonTip(3000)