Maximize window and bring it in front with powershell

Question

Is there a way to bring a window in front from powershell? I tried this to hide all windows (working) and bring me the powershell back (not working)

[void] [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("'Microsoft.VisualBasic")
$shell = New-Object -ComObject “Shell.Application”
$shell.MinimizeAll()

$a = Get-Process | Where-Object {$_.Name -like "powershell"}
[Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction]::AppActivate($a.ID)

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The PowerShell Community Extensions has a cmdlet to assist with this. You use it like so:

Set-ForegroundWindow (Get-Process PowerShell).MainWindowHandle

or

Set-ForegroundWindow (Get-Process -id $pid).MainWindowHandle

To activate/show a window try this (assuming you're on PowerShell 2.0):

$sig = '[DllImport("user32.dll")] public static extern bool ShowWindowAsync(IntPtr hWnd, int nCmdShow);'
Add-Type -MemberDefinition $sig -name NativeMethods -namespace Win32
Stop-Process -Name Notepad -ea 0;Notepad.exe
$hwnd = @(Get-Process Notepad)[0].MainWindowHandle
# Minimize window
[Win32.NativeMethods]::ShowWindowAsync($hwnd, 2)
# Restore window
[Win32.NativeMethods]::ShowWindowAsync($hwnd, 4)
Stop-Process -Name Notepad

Answer 2

This is cheating a bit since it's using WScript, but the following one-liner places the window in the foreground without requiring any external cmdlet installation.

In the example below, "notepad" is the process name associated with the window.

Credit goes to the Idera forum posting here by JSanders:

(New-Object -ComObject WScript.Shell).AppActivate((get-process notepad).MainWindowTitle)