#How to create a sample WinUI3 GUI in PowerShell?

160 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

magic pumice
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FYI if you run Get-Error you can get a more detailed message. The type initializer message is a wrapper exception, the real one is inside

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how did you install PowerShell? via msi or from the windows store?

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first thing you want to try then is install from msi

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store apps have some weird virtualization that sometimes impacts COM. REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG is common for isntance

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yeah not sure then. If the task in VS is building an appxbundle and launching that, it's possible that being launched from that context is what registers the component

That's just a guess though

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I would assume but I don't just VS so I can't give any pointers there. I know when I briefly looked in to MAUI I couldn't get it to work out of the appx that was built, before even getting to trying to get it working in PowerShell

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I don't think it's impossible to use winui outside of an appx, because you can extract WT's appx and run it directly. But I couldn't tell ya what is done differently there

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I can't say with certainly at the moment if it's possible or not from PowerShell specifically. I can only really say that finding out would likely require a lot of knowledge about winrt and probably the internals of PowerShell

lunar marsh
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I don't think WinUI3 is ... dynamic like that

magic pumice
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wouldn't shock me, but anything in particular make you think that? or just vague memories of something?

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it seems like cswin32 gets sorta lumped into memory - that one is pure source generator for sure if that's what you're thinkin' of

lunar marsh
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Well, it's been awhile, but basically ...

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In WPF, the XAML is shipped in the app and there's a parser class in .net

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But when the Windows team did it, the XAML is parsed at compile time, not run time

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Add-Type doesn't handle xaml

magic pumice
lunar marsh
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There must be existing XAML content; you cannot replace the entire tree of content. You must at the very least preserve the original root element so that the app model implications of a loaded XAML page remain active.

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Hypothetically, you'd need to write a WinRT app and then ... access PowerShell

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right

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because you need the root window to add this stuff to

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Then you can hook up event handlers

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I'm not sure you can access PowerShell from a WinRT app though

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At least, not in the sense of hosting it

magic pumice
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yeah I dunno. If WT uses winui I can say for sure there's some way to use winui outside of an appx bundle (but I'm not 100% on if WT uses it, but that is my impression)

even if you do need to compile some bit of xaml first, presumably there's a way to compile that at runtime and hook it in. Not saying that's easy and may indeed even be slightly less than feasible but there's probably some way

lunar marsh
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I assume a real WinRT app can't host PowerShell

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That's true (that WT is UWP)

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But it's not .net

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And it's not actually "hosting" PowerShell in the sense of being able to interact with the object model

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Still though. Hmmm..

magic pumice
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I more meant you can extract the appxbundle and launch wt as a win32 app and it all works fine, so presumably there's a way to do it outside of store apps

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(well, it doesn't all work fine, some of the settings that point to weird appx paths have to be changed, but that's mostly like icons and what not)

lunar marsh
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oh, but that's ... XAML islands, right

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I mean, it's a "traditional" Win32 app with UWP Xaml content

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Maybe that route would work

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lol

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  • A thin Win32 window that is mostly just responsible for drawing a window to the screen and starting up the XAML Hosting infrastructure
  • The rest of the app as a UWP XAML Application that uses WinUI

As a Win32 application, able to use all of the legacy Win32 APIs... But with access to UWP XAML and WinUI...

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But yeah, Edge and WT basically share the design and created the tab control in WinUI 😐

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Personally, I would ... write a WPF app 😉

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Hypothetically, you can host a WinUI Xaml Island in Windows Forms or WPF

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That article is kind-of grossly out of date 😕

magic pumice
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tbh even if it is possible to use purely winui3 in PowerShell, someone still needs to figure out how. There's a reason you can't find any examples of it being done, and it's not because no one has tried

(so until the day someone cracks it, your options are somewhat limited)

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(well, not very limited, just limited to not using purely winui3)

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have you considered just writing your app in C# as an actual uwp app?

lunar marsh
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Do the old WPF acrylic windows not work anymore?

magic pumice
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you can make some very pretty things with WPF

lunar marsh
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Yeah, but they might drop WinUI3 too

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lol

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Honestly, given they brought WPF forward to .NET Core, I wouldn't be too worried about it's future

magic pumice
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it would be a very surprising move if they made all WPF apps stop working completely. At most they'd move to security fixes only (maybe already there?) but full disabling is very unlikely even in the somewhat distant future

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definitely wouldn't say it's perfect for that, other languages make UI significantly easier. The way PowerShell handles state and threading is particularly problematic for UIs. Possible to work around for sure, but tedious

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but that's all unrelated anyway as same would be true for winui3 if that worked

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it has some abstractions that make it easier than if those abstractions did not exist, but async await with implicit closures and otherwise lexical state is way easier

lunar marsh
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There's no equivalent to async/await except jobs (which aren't equivalent)

magic pumice
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yeah, those are all language features. The closest thing to an equivalent is rolling your own version of what those language features generate. Which would ultimately be less useful than doing whatever you're doing now

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right, state is lexical so you can access whatever you could already access. Even locals are captured into a closure for you to use in the other thread

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a lot less management of background work as well, don't need to receive a job for instance

lunar marsh
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Well, the thing is, it's not meant for that 😉

magic pumice
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yeah it's sorta just the wrong tool for the job, so there's not really any focus in that area

lunar marsh
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Back in the day, I wrote a whole PowerShell WPF framework, with a WpfJob for threading, etc, so you could actually keep your terminal live, and send updates to the UI window ...

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But it obviously didn't work in PowerShell 6.x so it got a bit abandoned

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Now we could make it work again, but ... since WPF is Windows-only, it hasn't seemed like a great idea

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Have you seen ShowUI? 😉

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sighs

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I really hoped that MAUI would give us something more like Avalonia

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Of course, the .NET ecosystem is built on extension methods nowadays, and anything that uses them extensively is really hard to use in PowerShell

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Nope, the syntax just doesn't work in Powershell

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And you can't find them

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Take MarkDig for instance

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PowerShell 7.4 shipped a ConvertFrom-Markdown that's based on MarkDig

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$MD = ConvertFrom-Markdown C:\Users\Jaykul\Projects\Modules\ModuleBuilder\ReadMe.md

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So now, $md.Tokens is a Markdig.Syntax.MarkdownDocument

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No

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It's that the people who developed them used a .NET feature (Extension Methods) that, like "await" just never made it into POwerShell ( PowerShell had already created something similar, but in a different way)

magic pumice
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just to explain real quick, an extension method is a special syntax that lets you essentially add instance methods to a class, but defined outside of the class

lunar marsh
magic pumice
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(but in PowerShell, the invoke member binder won't look for them so they're just like every other static method)

lunar marsh
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All those methods like ConfigureNewLine and DisableHeadings are actually static methods on MarkdownExtensions

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So where they show:
new MarkdownPipelineBuilder().ConfigureNewLine("\r\n")

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In PowerShell, you'd need to write:

using namespace Markdig
$md = [MarkdownPipelineBuilder]::new()
$md = [MarkdownExtensions]::ConfigureNewLine($md,"\r\n")
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But first, you'd have to know about the method 😉

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In C#, your editor will show you ConfigureNewLine as a method on the $md because you can call it as $md.ConfigurationNewLine(...

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Now, in this particular case, we could add that with an XML file

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But in most cases it's not that simple, because the extension methods are generic

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Anyway

magic pumice
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(doesn't help make it any more pretty, but fwiw I did build something into class explorer to do the actual finding: )

image.png
lunar marsh
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@magic pumice yeah, there's been a Get-ExtensionMethod in my Reflection module forever.

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But in many cases, calling them is complex because you have to explicitly cast the object to the right type in order for PowerShell to figure out which overload of the extension method you mean ...

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And it gets really ugly

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hehe

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Well ...

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I don't know, since we haven't done that 😉

magic pumice
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if ugliness is scaled compared to complexity, then a simple language feature being that ugly makes them pretty comparable probably 😁

lunar marsh
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regex are in the std library

magic pumice
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but really that's closer on the side of a UI framework than it is to generic args. Supporting regex ain't no joke for sure

lunar marsh
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you know what's fun?

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(randomly)

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All the old ShowUI stuff still works (in Windows PowerShell)

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The weather widget didn't work, but that's just because Yahoo's weather API is gone 😉

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Yeah

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I mean, ShowUI ships a dll

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to make the threading stuff

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Oh, the llama pic is my desktop background

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Right

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I mean, mostly 😉

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oh, boo

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lol, I actually used that on my desktop for ages

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That one was transparent too, but I need a new source for weather

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heh

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Desktop widgets were ... a thing ... at the time

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yeah, these float ...

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I don't think I ever did "pin" them to the desktop to force them to stay at the bottom

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but you can drag them around by any part of the window...

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Which is just a set of properties you have to apply to a Window to make them look like that

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Nowadays, I would merge them into the main .psm1 when I shipped it

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But I would still keep them separate

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It looks like the only thing stopping this from working in PS7 is breaking changes to Add-Type

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Oh yeah, probably simple

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Of course ... there's probably a ton of other stuff

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And if I look at the C# code after a decade or so, I'll probably get sick to my stomach

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But ...

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It's just ... very old

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lol, ok, there might be some library updates needed too 😐

lunar marsh
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The compiler was all red

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The type name 'Thread' could not be found in the namespace 'System.Threading'. This type has been forwarded to assembly 'System.Private.CoreLib, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral ...

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etc

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How are you building GUIs currently?

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I mean, are you loading XAML?

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Oh, but their example uses a pack: url

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The simplest thing would probably be to import the assembly and use the fw:AcrylicWindow way, with the xmlns:fw="clr-namespace:SourceChord.FluentWPF;assembly=FluentWPF"

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As long as you've pre-loaded the assembly, that should "just work"

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ShowUI had some stuff for generating wrapper functions, but based on the last hour, I'm going to guess that's all broken 😉

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Although ... it would work in PS5

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you don't need to worry about multiple xamls in this case

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because it's just a custom control

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(I think)

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It's possible you need to do the merged ResourceDictionary thing, but it's been too long since I touched those, so I don't remember

magic pumice
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hey look at that! very cool

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it's a cool proof of concept! and definitely the first example of it's kind no doubt

you still can't use xaml and most of the code there is C# anyway so realistically you should probably still just use WPF

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(and really even for WPF I'd still recommend writing a C# app and simply host PowerShell in process. That way you get the best of both worlds, can still use the nice PowerShell modules, but handle all the UI stuff in C#)

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still very cool though!

lunar marsh
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for what it's worth, if you're interested in that route ...

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This is a very old project (at least as old as ShowUI) that I rewrote from a standalone terminal to a terminal control for WPF ....

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It's not PowerShell Core

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And frankly, writing such a thing for PowerShell Core is a lot more work, because you pretty much have to ship all of PowerShell, which means you have to build a new version every time there's a new PowerShell release....

magic pumice
sturdy garden
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.ThrowExceptionForHR( errorCode )
That sounds like human resources getting special treatment when something goes sideways