We’ll be using PowerShell to set our startup applications, but it can do a lot more. See this page for a summary of the Windows IoT PowerShell commands

Meanwhile, let’s get started by listing the apps installed on the Windows IoT Raspberry Pi. In PowerShell, enter the command

This shows us that we have several Headed apps and a few Headless apps as well. The Headless apps include the BlinkyHeadless app, and a Dotstar app we’ve been working on for a future project tutorial.

In general, the application names are kind of dense looking. Lots of characters and numbers. You can pretty much ignore the clutter, because PowerShell can do pattern matching. So, instead of laboriously typing the entire app name into a command, you can just type part of it. For instance, we can enter the command

and PowerShell will just list the apps that match:

In this tutorial, we’re interested in setting startup apps. We can list the currently registered startup apps with the IoTStartup startup command

The default headed startup app is IoTCoreDefaultApp. This is the app that put up the information screen on HDMI when you first booted your Pi. ZWaveHeadlessAdapterApp implements Z-Wave, a wireless communications protocol designed to allow devices in the home (lighting, appliances, etc.) to communicate with one another for home automation (see here: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/samples/zwavetutorial)

In the next section, we’ll register BlinkyHeadless as a startup app.