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How to display notifications on Windows 10 using PowerShell?

  • August 26, 2021
  • 6 min read
IT Production Manager. Nicolas is primarily focused on Microsoft technologies, he is a Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management.
IT Production Manager. Nicolas is primarily focused on Microsoft technologies, he is a Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management.


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In this guide, I will explain to create and display a notification using PowerShell. To perform this task, I will use PowerShell and especially, the BurntToast module which is a custom module available on GitHub. You can download the module or use the PowerShell Gallery to install on your machine: https://github.com/Windos/BurntToast. The PowerShell Module works on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019. At the time of writing, the latest version on PS Gallery is 0.8.5.

Notifications can be useful to display important information on your machine or to display information remotely on user workstations for example. In this guide, I will describe how to install this custom module, and then how to create your own notification locally.

First, run the following command to install the module for the PowerShell Gallery:

Do not forget to run your console as administrator before running the previous command.

Once the module is installed, you can run the “Get-Command” cmdlet to understand how to use the module. I will not cover all the cmdlet, but as you can see, it is easy to create a very complete notification.

Get-Command

The module is installed, then we can run the following cmdlet without additional arguments:

This basic cmdlet will create our first notification on the machine!

Create our first notification

Of course, as you can imagine, it is possible and very simple to customize the notification. We can customize the notification to adjust the logo, the text, add buttons, ….

Using the following command, I can easily add a logo with the “AppLogo” argument:

AppLogo

Now, I just add the “Text” argument to add:

  • The notification title
  • The notification description

It is very easy to understand, the first argument matches the title, and you can add two arguments to display a description in your notification. Two lines are the maximum allowed by the module.

Display a description in your notification

Depending on the notification content, you can also adjust the logo, in this example, I added a critical logo to notify users:

Add a critical logo to notify users

Now, we will add the ‘hero image’ which is the image on top of the notification. The following command creates a new Image element for Toast Notifications:

New Image element for Toast Notifications

This feature is very cool, you can add the company logo if you want to display notification on user’s workstations.

To finish this guide, we can add buttons on this notification. Thanks to these buttons, users can perform basic tasks. The following command lines will add two buttons on the notification:

Perform basic tasks

Of course, the module lets you perform other customizations to suit your needs, such as:

Adding sounds

Adding alarm clock

Hey! Found Nicolas’s article helpful? Looking to deploy a new, easy-to-manage, and cost-effective hyperconverged infrastructure?
Alex Bykovskyi
Alex Bykovskyi StarWind Virtual HCI Appliance Product Manager
Well, we can help you with this one! Building a new hyperconverged environment is a breeze with StarWind Virtual HCI Appliance (VHCA). It’s a complete hyperconverged infrastructure solution that combines hypervisor (vSphere, Hyper-V, Proxmox, or our custom version of KVM), software-defined storage (StarWind VSAN), and streamlined management tools. Interested in diving deeper into VHCA’s capabilities and features? Book your StarWind Virtual HCI Appliance demo today!