Open IE maximized from Powershell script?

Question

Pardon me if this is too simple a question, but I'm not finding anything in the help files or online so far regarding doing this. I'm opening up a new browser window to test the login/logout feature of a web based application, but I want to open the IE window in maximized mode. I could set the size as:

$ie.height = 1024 $ie.width - 768

But is there a keyword or anything that I can use to just open it up maximized automatically or would I need to query the screen size first and then fill in the values from that query?

/matt

Answer 1

If you have the PowerShell Community Extensions 1.2 (PSCX) installed on PowerShell 2.0, I have verified that this works:

Pscx\Start-Process IExplore.exe; Start-Sleep 3; $hwnd = Get-ForegroundWindow
$sig = @'
[DllImport("user32.dll")] 
public static extern bool ShowWindowAsync(IntPtr hWnd, int nCmdShow);
'@
Add-Type -MemberDefinition $sig -name NativeMethods -namespace Win32
[Win32.NativeMethods]::ShowWindowAsync($hwnd, 3)

It is a little dicey because it is using a wait (start-sleep) of 3 secs to wait for IE to open and then it uses a PSCX cmdlet to get the window handle of the foreground window. If you only have one instance of IExplore running then you can use this to get that handle:

@(Get-Process IExplore)[0].MainWindowHandle

PowerShell 2.0 is required for the Add-Type support that allows us to call down to the Win32 API.

BTW from a quick Bing search it seems that getting IE to start maximized is a pretty common problem. For instance, with Start-Process you can specify -WindowStyle Maximized but IE doesn't honor that.

Answer 2

(new-object -com wscript.shell).run("url",3)