Posts Tagged ‘Console’

For too long I have ignored the deficiencies in Get-Credential, so now I am going to fix them. Ready?

Ok, that’s better than the default, whew! At least you can specify the prompt text and the domain and default user name … but there are so many other options that are missing from that dialog —like remembering my credentials for goodness sakes. I know many places forbid using the “remember” option for credentials, but why is that decision not up to me?

Well, I can’t make all of those options appear (at least, not without compiling a pinvoke function to call the Win32 API) nor can I force PowerShell to use the new Vista/2008 Credential function (which is Common Criteria compliant in Vista) instead of the older CredUIPromptForCredentials ... but I can give you the most requested feature for Get-Credential: a -Console option to force the prompt to happen in the console instead of in a “CredUI” pop up.

Note: I kind-of messed up here, this will break if you’re used to using the -Credential parameter for Get-Credential to provide a default user name. I’ll fix it shortly.

To those of you who are not software developers: feel free to skip this post

A while ago I wrote a little class for calling console apps from a .Net application, and I’ve been using it in several of my apps (most notably in PoshConsole) and it works great, but since the only place I’ve really published it is in PoshConsole, I thought I’d write it up here, and share it with you …

Basically, it’s a slick invisible event-based wrapper around the Windows native console. What I mean is, it calls AllocConsole when it’s instantiated to create a native console, and hides the console window so it doesn’t show up. This allows you to run any console app you need to from within your app without having it popup a black window Note this doesn’t let you run graphical consoles like EDIT.COM, but it can handle interactive apps like cmd.exe, batch files, or ftp.exe). All you really have to do is create one of my NativeConsole objects, handle its WriteOutputLine and WriteErrorLine events … and use its WriteInput method to send input or commands to the console app.

You can check out how it works in my WPF-based PoshConsole, and you can get the latest version of it from that project as well (it’s in \trunk\Huddled\Interop\NativeConsole.cs) but for now, here’s the single file source code, with a more liberal set of licenses than I allow for PoshConsole. Read the rest of this entry »