PowerShell Gadget
PowerShell Gadget is a small gadget that hosts the PowerShell console window in your Sidebar.
Commands can be entered straight into the collapsed gadget or, by clicking on the PowerShell icon, the complete PowerShell console is available.
Download
The latest version is 1.3 (see below for change log)
ScreenShots
The console settings I’m using below are:
Background: RGB(23, 47, 59)
Foreground: White
Font: Consolas
Font Size: 14
The gadget in flyout mode displaying the output of building itself :-)
The gadget settings window
Change Log
Version 1.3
- Flyout height can now be changed in the Settings window.
Version 1.2
- Tweaked skin
Version 1.1
- Flyout console now gets focus automatically.
- Only one instance of gadget can be open at once.
- Improved flyout sizing code.
Version 1.0
- Initial release.





I love the PowerShell gadget! I don’t know if there is anyway to do this, but when cmdlet or script runs out of control, a CTRL-C restarts the entire sidebar, including all running gadgets.
Keep up the good work!
K^2
thanks this gadget my friend. sooo successful.
Nice work Andrew. I linked to the gadget from an article I just wrote at http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2007/07/16/windows-vista-product-guide-screencast-sidebar-and-gadgets.aspx.
Regards,
Keith
Would love to use it, in fact have just installed Powershell just so I COULD use it - but the link appears dead.
http://mindscape.co.nz/downloads/PowerShellGadget.gadget gives a 404 not found.
Is there another link, or am I being dumb?
I’ve fixed the link.
Cheers,
Andrew.
Hi there! Thought I’d let you know about a couple of problems:
If you type Exit (at least into the flyout) then the underlying PowerShell seems to exit and there’s no way to get it back. (I figured it might close the flyout, and I also just wanted to see what’d happen. :))
After doing that I closed the flyout and re-opened it, then pressed Ctrl-C while the still-dead flyout had the focus. This crashed the Sidebar completely.
Hi,
thanks for your great tool. I will use it during our upcomming Usergroup metting. While using it i came into the need to run the shell as an administator. Do you see a chance to implement such a feature?
Powershell not found?!?!?!
Same here “Powershell not found”. New problem or am i doing something wrong??
Is PowerShell installed?
I downloaded the gadget… renamed .zip to gadget… installet.. and the error message is shown inside the gadget on the sidebar.
You need to install PowerShell from Microsoft.
This truly IS the real man’s gadget!
I’m getting an error. I have PowerShell installed (latest non-CTP version) and when I open the Sidebar with the PowerShell gadget running I get a runtime error. Line 53, Object doesn’t support this property or method.
If I remove and reinstall the gadger while the Sidebar’s running I get a runtime error on line 78, Object doesn’t support this property or method.
Neither of these actually crashes the gadget, or the Sidebar. Clicking on the gadget to get the flyout gets another runtime error, line 53 again.
The only major thing I can think of that I’ve done recently is disable User Access Control,
Hi Jason,
Disabling UAC might have done it. The gadget uses a custom COM component that gets registered differently depending on whether UAC is on or off.
The COM dll may be registered manually by running the regasm.exe tool like so:
regasm\PowerShellGadget.gadget\Bin\Mindscape.Gadgets.PowerShell.dll /codebase
On my machine “gadget home” is C:\Users\Andrew\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets
Make sure you restart the Sidebar after doing this.
Cheers,
Andrew.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the quick reply! I tried using RegASM as you suggest, but ran into several problems. First there were several versions of RegASM on the system from the various .NET Frameworks. The one that seemed to work was the v2 one.
Second, for me to get the commnad you supplied to work I had to extract the contents of the .gadget file into a folder, in the GadgetHome. Is this correct or should the statement be able to read into archives?
Third, was that even after extracting the archive into a folder and running RegASM on the .dll you reference the runtime errors were unaffected. I tried it several times, from restarting the Sidebar and restarting the system. I’d be more than willing to carry this into emails if you want to access more technical details, like Event Logs etc.
HI Andrew,
any way to get this to work on a 64-Bit Vista where the Powershell is installed in wow64?
Great work :-)
Matthias
Howdy,
I’m about finished with a network scripting course and I’ve been digging around for cool stuff to do for a course project. I saw this and was wanting to play with it a bit. It just looks and sounds awesome. But, does it work with XP pro?
Excellent! Very impressed, at first I was just looking for a good cmd prompt gadget, I have not even used powershell yet. Works great and I’m excited to learn more about powershell. Thanks.
I found a bug :
If i press CTRL-C to stop a ping command it makes crash the whole sidebar
Your Gadget has been linked on http://www.PwrShell.net
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