Creating a Workflow with Windows PowerShell Activities

You can create a Windows PowerShell workflow by selecting activities from the Visual Studio Toolbox and dragging them to the Workflow Designer window. For information about adding Windows PowerShell activities to the Visual Studio Toolbox, see Adding Windows PowerShell Activities to the Visual Studio Toolbox.

The following procedures describe how to create a workflow that checks the domain status of a group of user-specified computers, joins them to a domain if they are not already joined, and then checks the status again.

Setting up the Project

1. Follow the procedure in Adding Windows PowerShell Activities to the Visual Studio Toolbox to create a workflow project and add the activities from the Microsoft.Powershell.Activities and Microsoft.Powershell.Management.Activities assemblies to the toolbox.

2. Add System.Management.Automation, Microsoft.PowerShell.Activities, System.Management, Microsoft.PowerShell.Management.Activities, and Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Management as to the project as reference assemblies.

Adding Activities to the Workflow

1. Add a Sequence activity to the workflow.

2. Create an argument named ComputerName with an argument type of String[]. This argument represents the names of the computers to check and join.

3. Create an argument named DomainCred of type System.Management.Automation.PSCredential. This argument represents the domain credentials of a domain account that is authorized to join a computer to the domain.

4. Create an argument named MachineCred of type System.Management.Automation.PSCredential. This argument represents the credentials of an administrator on the computers to check and join.

5. Add a ParallelForEach activity inside the Sequence activity. Enter comp and ComputerName in the text boxes so that the loop iterates through the elements of the ComputerName array.

6. Add a Sequence activity to the body of the ParallelForEach activity. Set the DisplayName property of the sequence to JoinDomain.

7. Add a GetWmiObject activity to the JoinDomain sequence.

8. Edit the properties of the GetWmiObject activity as follows.

   Property	Value
   Class	"Win32_ComputerSystem"
   PSComputerName	{comp}
   PSCredential	MachineCred

9. Add an AddComputer activity to the JoinDomain sequence after the GetWmiObject activity.

10. Edit the properties of the AddComputer activity as follows.

    Property	Value
    ComputerName	{comp}
    DomainCredential	DomainCred

11. Add a RestartComputer activity to the JoinDomain sequence after the AddComputer activity.

12. Edit the properties of the RestartComputer activity as follows.

    Property	Value
    ComputerName	{comp}
    Credential	MachineCred
    For	Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.WaitForServiceTypes.PowerShell
    Force	True
    Wait	True
    PSComputerName	{""}

13. Add a GetWmiObject activity to the JoinDomain sequence after the RestartComputer activity. Edit its properties to be the same as the previous GetWmiObject activity.

    When you have finished the procedures, the workflow design window should look like this.