Application and PowerShell plugin to query and set display settings (i.e. screen resolution).
This also serves as an example on how command line applications and PowerShell plugins compete in terms of features and development effort.
The current feature set is as follows:
- get current and available resolutions
- set current resolution
- get and address available screens for multi-monitor configurations
- localizations for en-US and de-DE.
The command line help should be rather self-explanatory:
> DisplaySettings.exe /?
Display Settings - (c) by Alexander Jung - https://github.com/ajdotnet/display-settings
SYNTAX:
DisplaySettings.exe xres yres [color depth] [frequency]
DisplaySettings.exe /query|/queryAll [/device device]
DisplaySettings.exe /queryDevices
System parameter:
@parameterfile read arguments from file
!logfile write output also to log file
/?|/h[help] show help
/v[erbose] show verbose output
/q[uiet] show no output
/nologo show no logo
xres horizontal resolution
yres vertical resolution
color depth colors in bits (8, 16, 32)
frequency screen refresh rate
device device number, as reported by /queryDevices
The queryDevices switch comes into play on multi-monitor configurations:
> DisplaySettings.exe /querydevices
Display Settings - (c) by Alexander Jung - https://github.com/ajdotnet/display-settings
Display Adapters
# Adapter Monitor
= ========================= ===================================
1 Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000 -> ThinkPad MaxBright Display 1600x900
2 Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000 -> Generic PnP Monitor (primary)
The device number then works on the query switch:
> DisplaySettings.exe /query /device 1
Display Settings - (c) by Alexander Jung - https://github.com/ajdotnet/display-settings
Display Settings
Monitor: #1: ThinkPad MaxBright Display 1600x900
Resolution: 1600 x 900
Color Depth: 32 bits per pixel
Refresh Rate: 60 Hertz
Note: The blog post (see background below) was written for Windows PowerShell 1.0. The code has since been updated to Windows PowerShell 2.0/4.0. I also changed it from snapin to module (see Modules and Snap-ins).
Details on how to install modules can be found here. Essentially:
- You want to play with the code, use
.\load-module.ps1in the output directory to load the module. - You want to use the module "productively", you copy everything to
%userprofile%\Documents\WindowsPowershell\Modules\DisplaySettings\. Load the module usingImport-Module DisplaySettings.
Additionally I have added multi-monitor support and proper localizations for en-US and de-DE.
After updating to Windows 10 my application did no longer work. Turns out there were several issues:
- Querying the current mode now returned the device name in uppercase letters ("CDD"), while enumerationg all modes still returned it lowercase ("cdd").
- Building the powershell project now resulted in an error:
1>C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\bin\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets(1697,5): warning MSB3275: The primary reference "System.Management.Automation, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35, processorArchitecture=MSIL" could not be resolved because it has an indirect dependency on the assembly "Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure.Native, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" which was built against the ".NETFramework,Version=v4.5" framework. This is a higher version than the currently targeted framework ".NETFramework,Version=v4.0".
I Checked. Runtime version of that assembly was still "v4.0.30319". Anyway, setting the target framework to 4.5 solved the issue.
For background see https://ajdotnet.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/command-line-tool-vs-powershell-cmdlet/
Note: This solution depends on AJ.Common and AJ.Console.