PowerShell Progress Notifications that work in Visual Studio Code on Window 10

Earlier this year I made the switch from PowerShell ISE to Visual Studio Code (VSCode) and everything has been going just swimmingly. Well, until I was modifying some old scripts that perform some long running processes and I’d previously added Write-Progress statements in them to provide feedback as to how the script was going. Long story short, Write-Progress doesn’t work in VSCode. I’m definitely not the first to notice this as there is an open issue on Github for it, but seeing as its been open for 2 1/2 years I figured it probably wasn’t going to be resolved soon.

So I went looking for alternatives. I’ve found two that I’m happy with and will be using moving forward. One is a text-based console output progress bar and the other uses Windows 10/Windows Server Notification Centre. This post explores both and how I’m using them.

psInlineProgress

psInlineProgress is authored by Øyvind Kallstad and has been around for a few years now, so does require a small tweak to get it to work with VSCode. Nothing major, just a change for the Console (details further below). The progress bar itself is similar to the Write-Progress one in PowerShell. Here is an example;

You can get it from here if you need a manual install, otherwise it’s quick to install via Install-Module

Install-Module -Name psInlineProgress

To allow the progress bar to display in VSCode update the psInlineProgress.psd1 file to change Line 36 as shown below. You should be able to find it in C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\psInlineProgress\1.1

#PowerShellHostName = 'ConsoleHost'
PowerShellHostName = 'Visual Studio Code Host'

Outputting to psInlineProgress

Updating the psInlineProgress bar is simply a case of giving the Progress Bar the dialog text you want displayed, in percent the progress, the progressed and un-progressed characters. In my example above I’m using the < symbol for the progress position, – for the un-progressed and . for the progressed.  Sort of like a Pac-Man consuming dashes and outputting periods.

The PowerShell line looks like this, where $percentComplete is an integer between 0 and 100. E.g

Write-InlineProgress -Activity "Getting User Object $($obj.displayName)" -PercentComplete $percentComplete -ProgressCharacter '<' -ProgressFillCharacter '.' -ProgressFill '-'

Burnt Toast

Burnt Toast is a newer module writen by Josh King that takes advantage of new features in Windows 10. The progress notification isn’t a progress bar, but a Toast Notification via the Notification Centre. Here is an example;

You can get it from here if you need a manual install, otherwise it’s quick to install via Install-Module

Install-Module -Name BurntToast

Outputting to Burnt Toast

Updating Burnt Toast is similar to inlineProgress whereby you pass dialog text you want displayed, the progress completed as a fraction between 0 and 1, and a graphic. E.g

$ProgressBar = New-BTProgressBar -Status 'Getting User Objects' -Value $progressDisplay
New-BurntToastNotification –Text ‘IdentityNow Source Import’ -ProgressBar $ProgressBar -Silent –UniqueIdentifier 'Get Users' -AppLogo "C:\Users\DarrenJRobinson\Images\sailpoint.png"

As Burned Toast is a Windows Notification, after the toast notification disappears it can still be found in the Notification Centre.

Other Burnt Toast Features

Burnt Toast can do much more, such as Alarms, Sounds and Reminders. See examples for those and more on Github here.

Working Example

Here is a working sample from a project where I’m processing thousands of identities. The $idnObjects is a PowerShell Object Collection of all the identities.

The following script snippet comes from the processing loop that processes the identities. $i is incremented on each loop (e.g $i++) and then used to calculate the percentage and fraction completed.

psInlineProgress and Burnt Toast are only updated each whole % of progress (that is calculated in line 9).

See the gist on github.

The output in VSCode therefore looks like the following. In reality you’d only have one or the other depending on what you were looking to achieve. I’ve done both together to show a side by side comparison.

Summary

Goodbye Write-Progress and Hello Burnt Toast and psInlineProgress