WPK – 2: Some thoughts, and my first really small databound app

My second article on using WPF from PowerShell. You can download WPK as part of the Windows 7 Resource Kit PowerShell Pack. When you can navigate to the folder <My Documents>\WindowsPowerShell\Modules you see the modules that are installed. The folder WPK contains the WPK module.

On the Modules level a few documents are installed:

• Readme1st.txt – information on installing, using, uninstalling the PowerShellPack
• About the Windows 7 Resource Kit PowerShell Pack.docx – an overview of the available modules
• Writing User Interfaces with WPK.docx - the first place to get started when working with WPK

Especially the Readme1st.txt contains two interesting pieces of information:

1. The file starts with the following text:
   

   Readme for the Windows 7 Resource Kit PowerShell Pack

                            by James Brundage

                Copyright (c) 2009 by Microsoft Corporation
                 Portions copyright (c) 2009 James Brundage
                            All Rights Reserved
   
   I thought James Brundage is an employee of Microsoft, why does he own portions of the copyright?

2. The disclaimer contains the following text:

   The Windows 7 Resource Kit PowerShell Pack included on the companion CD is
   unsupported by Microsoft and is provided to you as-is, with no warranty or
   guarantee concerning its functionality. For the latest news and usage tips
   concerning this PowerShell Pack, see the Windows PowerShell Team Blog at
   http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/.
   
   So no support from Microsoft’s side. I wonder how issues will be resolved and new releases will be published.

Ok, and now on to some programming. In the document Writing User Interfaces with WPK.docx we find a nice example of a process viewer that updates the list of processes every 15 seconds.

See the document for a great explanation on how it works.

When looking at this example I had a few questions:

1. What if I don’t want to do a timed update, but just bind to some existing data?
2. All examples do the data collection in the Get-PowerShellDataSource script block, is it possible to have the data already somewhere in a variable?
3. Can I skip the binding stuff, I know its really powerful, but I want to start simple?
4. Retrieve data in a background job is really cool, but what if we just want to load data and go?

My first simple try after a lot of testing and tweaking is the following:

I still use binding to the output, and in the datacontext script block I write the elements to bind to to the output. I still don’t bind to pre-calculated data in a variable.

After a lot more testing I came to the following code:

In the above code I create a variable with a list of objects with two properties, Name and Age, and bind the ItemsSource property of the ListView to this variable.

I bind the data in the Loaded event, the complete control tree is in place when this event fires.

I have named the ListView control ‘mylistview’, and with the  code in line 24 I can find the control by name. The $window variable points to the implicitly created Window control surrounding the ListView, and is always available.

Note that if we add the –AsJob parameter to the New-ListView command, the creation and binding is done in a background job on another thread, and the $list variable is not visible, not even if it is defined as a global variable (as $global:list)

Diving into this simplification kept me busy for a while and gave me as a WPF nono some insights in how things are working in WPF when doing this from PowerShell.

One question I still have in this simple example: is there an easier way to fill the $list variable so its still useful for databinding.I tried $list = @{ Name="Serge"; Age="43" }, @{ Name="Dinah"; Age="42" } but that does not work:-(

Let me know if this is of any help to you.

Happy coding!