Huddled Masses

Archive for January, 2009

This is just a short note to explain why I turned off IntenseDebate: it just seems to use way too much memory on my server — I had to increased the memory available to my blog twice, and was still having issues.

Quite frankly, I don’t feel like I was getting anything out of using Intense Debate other than the ability for users to get notified automatically when I reply to their comments, and to get that minor feature I had to give them all my comments, and render the comments in javascript, and … yeah, well, I’m going to do without for now, and we’ll see what happens.

Once I started playing with the new ability, introduced in PowerBoots 0.0.4 to easily add support for new graphical controls to PowerBoots, I found all sorts of fun widgets out there in open-source land. I’ll write about a few of them in the future, but for now I’m just going to stick with Visifire. After playing with a few examples, I finally got around to actually trying to create the graphs I needed at work which were the main source of motivation for trying to do Visifire from PowerShell anyway …

The problem was, half of the need we have for graphs is to throw them up on a web-server … so I needed a way to take the WPF window, and capture the controls and visuals as an image. Basically, render the WPF control to a bitmap image, instead of to the screen. To cut a long story short, I figured it out of course — why else would I be writing this? (get it here).

Out-BootsImage

So the new version of PowerBoots includes the Out-BootsImage function (aliased as BootsImage and “obi”), which basically is designed to take the filename of an image, and a boots visual element, and create a screenshot. It can generate bmp, gif, jpg, png, tiff, and even Microsoft’s new wdp format, or it can output to clipboard.

It’s late, so I’m not going to write any more about this … the bottom line is, if you have been looking for a (free) way to generate graphs and charts to image files in PowerShell, this will work for you: go grab Visifire, check out their gallery for inspiration, and start churning out graphs! Just for fun, here are the samples from the help documentation (except, this is the actual script I ran, including the upload code) with screen-shots …

Important note

When producing images of Visifire charts using this method, it is absolutely critical that you must specify -Animation $false because otherwise you will consistenly produce images of empty charts (since by default Visifire animates all of the bars onto the screen right after the SourceInitialized event that I use to capture the image). Oh, and if you need to remove the Visifire.com watermark, there is a -watermark $false parameter on the Chart element, which turns it off.

This is the fourth release of the PowerBoots module for PowerShell 2 (Download – 7z). PowerBoots is a framework for creating WPF GUIs from PowerShell, and this latest release brings a couple of bug fixes and two new features.

Now with tab completion

The biggest change in PowerBoots 0.0.4 is that tab-completion for parameters works in the shell.

Behind the scenes what has happened is that I’ve discovered that in the current CTP3 release of PowerShell 2, Dynamic Parameter sets are not handled correctly for aliases, and the Get-Command for aliases of functions doesn’t return the same set of parameters as it does on the function itself. The result is that Tab-Completion for dynamic parameters doesn’t work on aliases (neither the built-in tab completion, nor MoW’s PowerTab). I wrote up a bug against that, but I also found that I can work around it by creating hundreds of functions (all pointed at the same script-block), instead of hundreds of aliases (all pointed at the same function).

PowerBoots produces functions instead aliases

This means the PowerBoots commands show up by default when you run Get-Command. Incidentally, this means that the first time you run Get-Command after you Import-Module PowerBoots you incur a huge penalty (17 seconds on my machine) while Get-Command caches all the dynamic parameter information about the functions. NOTE: because of the DynamicParam bug, I’ve ditched aliases altogether for this particular project and am generating two functions for each element/type in PowerBoots: the full New-Namespace.Type version, and a “Type” alias when possible. Trust me when I say: “it’s worth it” ... with the backing scriptblock, there’s virtually no difference between the two approches in terms of resources (other than the aforementions hit on Get-Command).

Now with more controls

The second big change (and the one which I hope will have the biggest long-term impact) is that you can now import your own WPF control libraries into PowerBoots. This means that you can, for example, go get the open source Visifire charting library, extract their WPFVisifire.Charts library into your PowerShell folder, and use it like so:

So, I wrote up this great explanation about how much the Shell in Windows 7 has changed from Vista, and how this shows that this Windows 7 beta is a much bigger deal than most of the whiners in the press are giving it credit for being, and explain about how I used to be a shell developer, and how that means I should have credibility when it comes to discussing changes in the taskbar, systray, desktop, and their various preference panels ….

Then Windows 7 bluescreened

I think the drivers for Mesh, (maybe VirtualCloneDrive, or Eset’s NOD32) ... didn’t like going into hibernation. Anyway, I lost all that, so let me just list for you some of the changes just in the shell. I’m going to ignore the multi-touch capability, and “Homegroup“s, and the “Libraries” that are really impressive if you’ve never learned how to make a junction …

1. You have complete control over what icons show in the systray. By default, new apps don’t get to show you anything. Hurrah!
2. You can chose large icons for task bar. Actually, it defaults to large icons, so I guess I should say you can choose small icons, but since that’s all that was available in previous versions of Windows, it seems like the new stuff should be what I mentioned. Oh, you know what these larger icons mean?
1. The systray clock now shows the date by default (hurrah!). Ok, I know that’s not actually a big change, but it’s a tiny thing that makes me happier.
2. Each running process gets exactly ONE (squarish) tile on the task bar, with a little extra ridge on the side if it represents more than one window. Of course, that’s just the default:
3. You can switch the text labels back on to make things look like before
1. You can turn off the “grouping” so each window gets it’s own button
3. You can drag tasks on the taskbar to reorder them. I’ve been using Taskix as one of my first installs for years, so this isn’t as big a deal as it could be, but it’s pretty interesting, when you combine it with:
4. You can use WIN+ to launch another copy of a task (based on the order they’re in on the taskbar). Incidentally, if anyone from the team is listening, you should focus the already running task, if there is one, so that pressing Win+# is like clicking the button. Oh, and WIn+Shift+# could run a new one.
5. Mousing over a taskbar tile pops out a pane with thumbnails of each window (or tabs), and mousing over the thumbnails actually hides all the other windows so you can see just that window (or tab) ... and there’s even a close button, so you can close the ones you don’t want without switching to them
6. Dragging a window to a screen edge lets you tile it in place, or maximize it. Cool, and about time ... really we need a few other options on this too, and it should work on the “inside” edges of a multi-monitor setup (hopefully they’ll fix that).
7. The right-click menu for a task tile is customizable: it can show you a list of things to chose from to open in that app: like your recent folders (file manager), your recent history (browser), your “status” (instant messenger), etc.
8. There’s (almost always) a button on that right-click menu for launching another copy of the app. And you can right-click it to get the “run as admin”
9. The task bar tiles can show (become, really) a progress bar! I can’t explain how cool this is, or how many other things it could be used for, but if you’ve got Windows 7, try downloading something large in IE8 — you actually see the progress as a green background on the taskbar button. I have to investigate whether this means you can owner-draw stuff on the taskbar, or if they’ve just provided progress bars built-in. If it’s the former, you can expect to see lots of cool stuff in the near future (like counts of unread messages or emails, etc).
10. Two tiles for the same app appear to be merged together — That is, if you unstack windows, or choose to stack only when there are too many to fit, the borders between buttons are less visible, and the mouse-over highlight carries across them. This is most noticeable if you make your taskbar vertical.

1. There is coloring of apps, so when you mouse over the taskbar buttons, they get highlighted in a color that is based on their icon.

OK, there’s actually more changes than just those … the desktop wallpaper has a built-in “slideshow” feature, so you can have your wallpaper change every day (or every 10 seconds, or something in between). The UAC prompts have a link on them to the UAC preference panel where you can disable UAC as easy as sliding a slider. The taskbar can “learn” just like the start menu does, to keep the apps you use the most always available… or you can just pin those apps to the taskbar manually (again, just like the start menu).

So there’s lots of cool new features in the shell, even without getting into touch interfaces and other stuff, and generally, I think this represents a bigger change than the windows 95-98 and possibly even bigger than 2000 to XP, and on top of all that, the relative performance of the system seems to go in the right direction for a change.

[new] You should check out the new release of PowerBoots, and the walkthrough PowerBoots Tutorial that I wrote up … this post is getting out of date.

If you haven’t seen the Ruby Shoes graphical framework, you should check it out. In fact, go read the tutorial and come back, because the rest of this will make a lot more sense then.

It’s a very slick toolkit, right?

From my previous post introducing PowerBoots

Well, here it is: PowerBoots 0.0.1

I hacked some things together in binary form, and Jeffrey Snover did some pure magic in a script, and after playing with various different mixes of it, I’m going to release the pure-script, CTP3-only, PowerBoots module now, and I’ll follow up with the backwards-compatible Out-WPF that gives you external threading later on.

I think you’ll find this is pretty slick already

Unpack the “PowerBoots” folder into one of your Module folders, and then just run imo PowerBoots and you’re off to the races. Imo is not short for immolate, nor for “in my opinion” ... it’s the alias for the newly renamed Import-Module cmdlet.

Once you’ve got that set up, check out the Demo-PowerBoots.ps1 script. Don’t just run it — open it in an editor and check it out, then run a few of the individual sections, and play with them to get a feel for how this works.

I’ll have more very soon, but for now, let me tantalize you with this little demo:

I’m almost ready to release a version of Out-WPF which will work on both my PoshConsole host (embedding in the host when appropriate) and on PowerShell.exe, both in CTP3 and in v1 … but since Jeffrey outed my little video demo, I figured I might as well share it here. Read the rest of this entry »