Everyday Powershell - Part 8 - Powershell Slideshow

This is the next part in an ongoing series about Powershell. You may have heard about how awesome Powershell is but have struggled to find ways to make it useful in your day to day work. That's what this series is going to address. It'll provide scripts and knowledge to address practical everyday problems

First let me congratulate you finding this article! Especially if you came via Google. Finding a blog post on "Powershell Slideshows" among all the "Powerpoint" slideshows would have been an interesting challenge!

Let's say you wanted a PC to boot up and show a slideshow of images in a given folder. Do you think that you'd need some third party software? Could windows photo viewer do it? A colleague of mine was about to create a video in Windows Movie Maker before I asked...

"Why don't we try POWERSHELL?"

$folder = "C:\Users\someuser\Documents\Pictures\" $wait = 1 [void][reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms") $form = new-object Windows.Forms.Form $form.Text = "Image Viewer" $form.WindowState= "Maximized" $form.controlbox = $false $form.formborderstyle = "0" $form.BackColor = [System.Drawing.Color]::black $pictureBox = new-object Windows.Forms.PictureBox $pictureBox.dock = "fill" $pictureBox.sizemode = 4 $form.controls.add($pictureBox) $form.Add_Shown( { $form.Activate()} ) $form.Show() do {     $files = (get-childitem $folder | where { ! $_.PSIsContainer})     foreach ($file in $files)     {         $pictureBox.Image = [System.Drawing.Image]::Fromfile($file.fullname)         Start-Sleep -Seconds $wait         $form.bringtofront()     } } While ($running -ne 1)

Most of this was pinched from here;

https://gist.github.com/zippy1981/969855

Our contribution is the fact it's Fullscreen and the Do While loop. Those clever observers among us will notice the $running will never equal 1 so that do loop is infinite. Which suits our purpose just fine.

What started as a way to settle an argument with a colleague (about the usefulness of powershell in media rich environments) became a great way to demo the windows.forms objects!

Beware though it is a bit of mess from a UI perspective. You can't quit the form once it's shown, you can alt tab and kill it from task manager when you need to close it. It suits what we need because it's just for a PC that boots up and runs a slide show, then shuts down at night. The users won't have to ever touch this PC. This is not something I'd give to end users to interact with. But it's fine for our purposes.