Using .NET

We’ll try two examples in this section – an alternative way of getting an action to fire, such as a script, and how we can call Windows GUI elements from PowerShell.

An alternative to the Task Scheduler

In this example, we’re going to create a timer object and then use the Register-Event cmdlet to fire an action at regular intervals.

First, let’s make a timer:

$timer = (New-Object -TypeName System.Timers.Timer -Property @{
AutoReset = $true
Interval = 5000
Enabled = $true
}
)

Now, we need to register the event and define an action:

Register-ObjectEvent -InputObject $timer -EventName Elapsed -SourceIdentifier Test -Action {Write-Host "hello"}

Now, let’s start the timer going with the following:

$timer.start()

Then, we should see the hello string appear on the screen, every five seconds, until we type the following:

$timer.stop()

This is how it looks on my machine:

Figure 16...