

When this application server pool is down, the announcement service will also fail. This assignment means that the application server is responsible for the announcement and the response group service of that application server is used in order to play the announcement to the caller. These announcements are created and assigned to a particular application server pool i.e a front end pool.

Announcements are pre-determined messages that can be played when a user dials an incorrect number, unallocated number and they can even be used to route into response groups and other third party applications. Those of you familiar with Skype for Business voice functionality will be aware of the use of announcements. Once complete copy the code to your PowerShell script, convert into variables, then reference the variables in your code to “do stuff”. you guessed it, a UI to design your UI, drag and drop, select component etc. However, I was astonished how easy it was. Plus I am an impatient man, so I just wanted to get things working as fast as I could. I have never used Visual Studio before, mainly because I am scared of it and didn’t really know where to start. I stumbled on a forum post that suggested to use Visual Studio to build your UI and then import it into your PowerShell script. Looking around, I found a few projects that had made PowerShell modules you could reference to build your UI, but still there was a dependency on that module being installed on the system the script would eventually run on. This of course may be down to my n00b coding skills but I imagine there are many people out there like me.

Neither solution for me was ideal, PowerShell Studio just made my head hurt, while going old school and writing line by line was inefficient and often a simple script would bloat out from 50-60 lines of code to easily 2 or 300 lines. Or buy expensive software such as Sapien’s PowerShell Studio that did most of the heavy lifting for you, but you needed to be somewhat of a PowerShell wizard to create even basic scripts.

Previously, designing a UI in PowerShell meant you had to either write hundreds of lines of code referencing the Windows.Forms library, drawing out objects, assigning styles to them etc. However, I wanted to share with you a method that can be easily adopted to give your PowerShell scripts a nice User Interface. First off, this is not really a Skype for Business post, and I do not pretend to be a Dev, so if you are looking for in depth coding then there are others out there who are way better than me.
