Applescript: display dialog while doing shell script

Hello there,
I'm making an applescript app for my company, and had a question.
The functionallity of the app is working great, but there is a certain step which can take up to several minutes.
This can give the user the feeling that nothing is happening and things are stuck.
Is there a possibility to display a dialog as long as the action (shell script) is running?
Something along the lines of "Now performing action X. please wait...)
Thanks for your thoughts!
Grtz

With regular AppleScript you can start the shell script in the background (see do shell script in AppleScript) and then put up a dialog, although you would have to periodically check to see if the shell script is finished. In Lion, the AppleScript Editor has a Cocoa-AppleScript template that you can use (kind of a wrapper application that lets you use various Cocoa methods without having to use Xcode), in which case you could put up an indeterminite progress indicator and then do the shell script.
AppleScript Studio is deprecated as of Snow Leopard, but there are some AppleScriptObjC in Xcode tutorials at MacScripter. An additional source of information and templates is macosxautomation, but they seem to be having some server problems at this time. I also have a Progress Window template application example, it can be downloaded here.

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===========================================
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