Huddled Masses
April 19th, 2009 | 
Author: Well, it’s been awhile since I posted anything, and this causes me angst. I’ve been spending all of my time lately on PoshCode.org — not writing content, but working on a new Asp.Net MVC-based back-end (on codeplex) — but in the meantime, this month PoshCode.org finally passed this site’s raw pageview count, and it made me realized I hadn’t posted anything in a long time.
I have a whole stack of PowerBoots demos that I’ve been promising various people that I would post, so I figure I really ought to start putting them up, even if I don’t feel like I have time to properly explain them.
A few in particular don’t need much explaining, so lets start with a couple of those. A while back I wrote a kitchen timer function in response to Hal Rottenberg’s one liner and recently I had cause to pull that out to help my kids take turns playing computer games on Up to Ten … but I needed something a little more visible for their sake.
So I converted my old script to a new PowerBoots-based version with large numbers and a gradient brush that slides across and turns the whole thing to red text as the end of the time get’s closer and closer:
Posted in Huddled
Very cool!
I had to remove the BitmapEffect from line 122 to get it to work on my machine, though. I was getting an error about ‘OuterGlowBitmapEffect’ not being recognized. Works great on my machine without it though!
Yeah, sorry about that … you just need to add OuterGlowBitmapEffect to the list of things that PowerBoots loads … the complicated but easily permanent way is to make a file in the powerboots folder called: “PresentationFramework^System.Windows.Media.Effects.Proxies.txt” and put “OuterGlowBitmapEffect” (without quotes) on a line by itself in that file. Of course, you probably want to go ahead and also add “BevelBitmapEffect”, “BitmapEffectGroup”, “BlurBitmapEffect”, “DropShadowBitmapEffect”, “EmbossBitmapEffect” to that file too
In the next release you won’t need to add these, ‘cause they’ll be there by default, plus the Add-BootsFunction function which you can use now, will be a permanent step so you won’t need to keep running it over and over