About

Demo of how to start a Windows Sandbox with custom apps installed in parallel with Chocolatey & PowerShell 7

If you're not already up to speed with Windows Sandbox, go check out here first.

Windows Sandbox allows you to specify a number of folders to map into the container at startup, as well as a start up script. Here, we demonstrate using this combination to install:

• Chocolatey
• PowerShell 7 preview (To take advantage of Foreach -Parallel)
• Followed by any number of desired source packages (in parallel using choco and PS7)

How to use

• Clone the repo or otherwise download to your system.
• Edit the .wsb file and edit the <HostFolder>c:\temp\WindowsSandbox</HostFolder> line to match the saved location.
• [Optional] Edit the .ps1 file to amend the list of applications that will be installed into the sandbox.

Anything on its own in the $Packages array will be installed in its own runspace: @("notepadplusplus")
Any array with multiple elements will be installed sequentially in their own runspace: @("vscode", "vscode-powershell")

Save and double click the .wsb file to launch the container and wait for the script to finish processing!

Caveats

• Nothing can be installed in the sandbox that requires a reboot, since that will reset the container to the initial state (maybe soon we'll get more persistent containers)
• There are downloads associated with each install, worth being aware of if on a managed or slow connection. You could amend to use a local Chocolatey repo if this is a concern.

Why Powershell 7? Couldn't you have done this with Start-Job ??

Yes, but I wanted PS7 on my sandbox to begin with. Feel free to fork and pull if you want to remove the dependency on it.