Tool-highlight: Show Windows Toast Messages with PowerShell
Happy New Years, everyone!
This will be a quick post here, but I just wanted to shine a spotlight on an AWESOME tool that I absolutely love: Joshua King’s ‘BurntToast’ PowerShell module, which makes the arduous task of rendering a Windows Toast notification VERY Easy.
Check out his GitHub repo here, and view the module’s page on the PowerShell gallery here.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about
Why might I want to use this?
Any time you want to provide data to the end-user, but not require them to drop everything to interact. I don’t know about you, but I really dislike alert dialog boxes.  Especially if they lock my whole desktop until I quickly ignore it and click the ‘X’ button…err, read it.
I also believe that toasts are what users expect, especially to receive updates from long-running scripts. Â They really do provide a polished, refined look to your scripts.
Finally, you can also provide your own image and play your own sound effects too!
Real-time encryption notices
At a current customer, we’re deploying a device management profile using MDM to use BitLocker encryption on these devices.  We decided that it would be very useful to be able to see updates as a device was encrypting, so I wrote up this script around the BurntToast tool.
install-module BurntToast -Force Import-module BurntToast
$EncryptionStatus = Get-BitLockerVolume -MountPoint c:
While ($EncryptionStatus.VolumeStatus -eq 'EncryptionInProgress'){
if (($EncryptionStatus.EncryptionPercentage % 5)-eq 0){ New-BurntToastNotification -Text 'Encryption Progress', "Now $($EncryptionStatus.EncryptionPercentage)% completed." }
Start-Sleep -Seconds 30
$EncryptionStatus = Get-BitLockerVolume -MountPoint c: Write-host $EncryptionStatus.EncryptionPercentage }
New-BurntToastNotification -Text 'Encryption Completed' 'Now completed.' -Image "C:\\Users\\sred1\\Dropbox\\Docs\\blog\\foxderp - Copy.png"
And a screen shot of it in action!
