How to get a timer in a Powershell messagebox?

Question

I'm trying to display a timer in my message box that I created with PS Forms. I would like something like that:

" Your PC will be shutdown in 10 sec" after 1 sec.

"Your PC will be shutdown in 9 sec"

"Your PC will be shutdown in 8 sec" and so on.

Hope you can help me.

Answer 1

I don't see a way of refreshing the text in a message box. If I had to do this I would probably pop up another form with a label and use a timer that refreshes the text of the label on each tick.

Here is a code example to use a potential starting point:

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Drawing
$Form = New-Object system.Windows.Forms.Form
$script:Label = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Label
$script:Label.AutoSize = $true
$script:Form.Controls.Add($Label)
$Timer = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Timer
$Timer.Interval = 1000
$script:CountDown = 60
$Timer.add_Tick(
    {
        $script:Label.Text = "Your system will reboot in $CountDown seconds"
        $script:CountDown--
    }
)
$script:Timer.Start()
$script:Form.ShowDialog()

You will need to expand to meet your needs such as conditional logic to do whatever action you want (e.g., reboot) when the count down reaches 0, perhaps add a button for aborting, etc.

Answer 2

There's PopUp Method from Windows Script Host, that enables you to set a time to live for the PopUp. I don't think that there is a way no refresh a message box from PowerShell (don't quote me on that). Two lines of the code came from here.

Not sure if it's this that you want, but this works (crude solution):

$timer = New-Object System.Timers.Timer
$timer.AutoReset = $true #resets itself
$timer.Interval = 1000 #ms
$initial_time = Get-Date
$end_time = $initial_time.AddSeconds(12) ## don't know why, but it needs 2 more seconds to show right

# create windows script host
$wshell = New-Object -ComObject Wscript.Shell
# add end_time variable so it's accessible from within the job
$wshell | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name endTime -Value $end_time

Register-ObjectEvent -SourceIdentifier "PopUp Timer" -InputObject $timer -EventName Elapsed -Action {
    $endTime = [DateTime]$event.MessageData.endTime
    $time_left = $endTime.Subtract((Get-Date)).Seconds

    if($time_left -le 0){
        $timer.Stop()
        Stop-Job -Name * -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
        Remove-Job -Name * -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
        #other code
        # logoff user?
    }
    $event.MessageData.Popup("Your PC will be shutdown in $time_left sec",1,"Message Box Title",64)
} -MessageData $wshell

$timer.Start()

EDIT : The solution presented by @JonDechiro is much cleaner than mine and more apropriate for what OP asked.