Appendix. GUI technologies and PowerShell
In chapters 23–25, we showed you how to build a graphical user interface (GUI) as part of a PowerShell script. We chose to use the WinForms technologies, and we made heavy use of a tool called PowerShell Studio (formerly PrimalForms), sold by SAPIEN Technologies (http://sapien.com). In this appendix, we want to briefly explain some of those decisions in more detail. Frankly, there’s very little technology associated with those decisions—they’re more practical and political—which is why we’ve pulled this discussion into an appendix, so that we didn’t have to interrupt the main narrative of the book.
We had to choose between two distinct ways of building the GUI: Windows Forms, which folks refer to as WinForms, or Windows Presentation Foundation, which is usually called WPF.
WinForms is the older technology, dating back to the first version of the .NET Framework. It utilizes GUI components that are, for the most part, native to Windows itself; the .NET Framework is merely a way of accessing them. We find WinForms to be fairly straightforward to work with and more than sufficient for building the more straightforward tools that administrators usually want to create.