Have you ever wanted to create a menu driven PowerShell GUI to conduct a series of automated tasks? You are in luck, because that is exactly what we are going to cover in this post. This very simple PowerShell GUI will help you easily distribute your code to other team members or maybe you just want to make your life easier.

To further enhance your simple PowerShell GUI, take a look at my Out-GridView blog post.

Lets jump right into the code

GitHub

Start out by formatting the menu the way you want it; put something descriptive in for the menu title. Modify lines 1 to 6 with information for your GUI project. You can also add or remove lines based on how many menu items you need. Lines 13 to 17 need to be modified to reflect the functions that you want to call when a specific number is entered. More on the functions below.

Menu Code:

Write-Host "~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Menu Title ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~" -ForegroundColor Cyan
Write-Host "1: Enter 1 to execute Function One"
Write-Host "2: Enter 2 to execute Function Two"
Write-Host "3: Enter 3 to execute Function Three"
Write-Host "4: Enter 4 to execute Function Four"
Write-Host "5: Enter 5 to execute Function Five"
Write-Host "Q: Enter Q to quit."

$input = (Read-Host "Please make a selection").ToUpper()

switch ($input)
{
    '1' {Function_One}    ### Input the name of the function you want to execute when 1 is entered
    '2' {Function_Two}    ### Input the name of the function you want to execute when 2 is entered
    '3' {Function_Three}  ### Input the name of the function you want to execute when 3 is entered
    '4' {Function_Four}   ### Input the name of the function you want to execute when 4 is entered
    '5' {Function_Five}   ### Input the name of the function you want to execute when 5 is entered
    'Q' {Write-Host "The script has been canceled" -BackgroundColor Red -ForegroundColor White}
    Default {Write-Host "Your selection = $input, is not valid. Please try again." -BackgroundColor Red -ForegroundColor White}
}

Now that you have your menu formatted the way you want it, we can jump into a brief walk through of how to setup the functions. In your ps1 script, you will want these functions above your code for the menu. If you changed the function names in your menu code then you will need to ensure the names line up here. Put your code for a given function in between the { } and when that function is called your code will be executed.

Functions Code:

###############################################
Function Function_One {
    write-host "Function One executed!"
}
###############################################
Function Function_Two {
    write-host "Function Two executed!"
}
###############################################
Function Function_Three {
    write-host "Function Three executed!"
}
###############################################
Function Function_Four {
    write-host "Function Four executed!"
}
###############################################
Function Function_Five {
    write-host "Function Five executed!"
}
###############################################

At this point, you have everything you need if you want to utilize PowerShell ISE to run this GUI menu. Continue reading if you don’t want to use the ISE.

There is one final piece of code that you will want to put at the very bottom of your script. This code forces the user to hit a key to exit the GUI. This will allow you to put error handling or success codes inside of your script which will be presented to the user before the GUI closes.

Exit Code:

Write-Host "Press any key to exit..."
$Readkey = $Host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey("NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown")

Final steps

To finalize this simple GUI, we need to do a few things to make it easy for others to execute it. In the following steps, we will create a shortcut that can be double clicked to launch the simple GUI.

1. Create a folder structure to house this script and a shortcut to the script. You can have the shortcut and the script in separate locations if you prefer, but for this example, they will be in the same directory. This would ideally be on a share that is accessible by everyone that needs to run this.
2. Save the ps1 script you’ve created for this simple GUI in the folder from step 1.
3. Create a shortcut to the ps1 script in the folder from step 1
   1. Right Click -> New -> Shortcut
   2. In the location field put in the following (replace the file path):
      • C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File "\\FullPath\ToYour\Script\Simple_GUI.ps1"
   3. Click Next
   4. Give the shortcut a name and then click Finish
4. When you are done you should have something that looks like this:

Simple GUI in action

Finally, we can see the Simple GUI in action. Double click on the shortcut and we are presented with the menu.

Upon entering the number 5, you can see that the function was successfully executed and it is now waiting for the user to press any key to exit.

That’s it for now, thanks for reading!

• powershell