Category: PowerShell

I like to make little videos to go with my blog posts, and today I’ve been looking for a way to resize my browser window to a consistent size for recording.

Google immediately turned up this little beauty in the TechNet Script Center:

• Set-Window: Set the position and size of a Window

But when I tried it out:

Set-Window -ProcessName msedge -Width 1024 -Height 768

…I got a scary error:

Cannot convert argument "hWnd", with value: "System.Object[]", for "GetWindowRect" to type "System.IntPtr": "Cannot convert the "System.Object[]" value of type "System.Object[]" to type "System.IntPtr"."
At C:\Git\PowerShell\Set-Window.ps1:91 char:9
+         $Return = [Window]::GetWindowRect($Handle,[ref]$Rectangle)
+         ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [], MethodException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : MethodArgumentConversionInvalidCastArgument

Here are the relevant lines from the function:

$Handle = (Get-Process -Name $ProcessName).MainWindowHandle
$Return = [Window]::GetWindowRect($Handle,[ref]$Rectangle)

A bit of exploring shows that one of the msedge processes is very different from the others:

$msedge = Get-Process msedge

$msedge

 NPM(K)    PM(M)      WS(M)     CPU(s)      Id  SI ProcessName
 ------    -----      -----     ------      --  -- -----------
     10     1.77       2.64       0.03     904   1 msedge
     19    17.69      30.85       0.34    4044   1 msedge
     57   128.71     150.07      57.81    5000   1 msedge
     83   185.82     182.69      38.77    8840   1 msedge
     29    47.08      75.16       9.78    9548   1 msedge
     83    82.12     128.55     171.92   11304   1 msedge
     22    27.96      41.45       0.41   11596   1 msedge
     20    21.31      38.14       2.47   12664   1 msedge
     49   303.89     156.82     116.14   12828   1 msedge
     24    29.71      48.62       1.52   14788   1 msedge
     26    21.57      31.14      25.20   15904   1 msedge
     56   132.80     157.91      76.39   15976   1 msedge
     20    19.50      33.82       0.27   16360   1 msedge
     16    11.88      19.46       0.05   16416   1 msedge
     34    59.82      89.91       3.55   17300   1 msedge
     29    48.37      76.49       3.34   17884   1 msedge
     22    25.07      42.07       0.41   18408   1 msedge
     27    51.70      78.73       5.69   18492   1 msedge
     26    39.59      60.88       0.81   18520   1 msedge
     28    54.87      73.89      18.56   19080   1 msedge
     47   108.27     135.33      26.95   19888   1 msedge

$msedge.MainWindowHandle

0
0
0
0
0
4326398
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0

This was my first solution, which works fine:

# Only get non-zero handles
$Handle = (Get-Process -Name $ProcessName).MainWindowHandle | Where-Object {$_.ToInt32() -gt 0}
# The Handles have type IntPtr. Without .ToInt32() you get this error:
# Cannot compare "0" because it is not IComparable

But after a bit of poking around, I think this is a little better:

# Only get process whose parent is explorer
$Handle = (Get-Process -Name $ProcessName | Where-Object {$_.Parent.ProcessName -eq 'explorer'}).MainWindowHandle