Huddled Masses
January 16th, 2009 | 
Author: 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.
$credential = Get-Credential
Chart -Width 200 -Height 150 -Theme Theme3 -Watermark $false -Animation $false (
DataSeries $(
1..(Get-Random -min 3 -max 6) | ForEach-Object {
DataPoint -YValue (Get-Random 100)
}
)
) | Out-BootsImage VisiFire-BootsImage.jpg |ForEach-Object {
Send-FTP HuddledMasses.org $credential -LocalFile $_ -Remotefile "$imgPath/$($_.Name)"
[Windows.Clipboard]::SetText( "!http://huddledmasses.org/images/PowerBoots/$($_.Name)!" )
}
StackPanel -Margin "10,5,10,5" $(
Label "Please enter your name:"
StackPanel -Orientation Horizontal $(
TextBox -OutVariable global:textbox -Width 150 -On_KeyDown {
if($_.Key -eq "Return") {
Write-Output $textbox[0].Text
$BootsWindow.Close()
}
}
Button "Ok" -Padding "5,0,5,0" -Margin "2,0,0,0" -On_Click {
Write-Output $textbox[0].Text
$BootsWindow.Close()
}
)
) | Out-BootsImage BootsImage-Screenshot.jpg | ForEach-Object {
Send-FTP HuddledMasses.org $credential -LocalFile $_ -Remotefile "$imgPath/$($_.Name)"
[Windows.Clipboard]::SetText( "!http://huddledmasses.org/images/PowerBoots/$($_.Name)!" )
}
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Hi Joel,
this is a great piece of software and I am using it fine in Vista 32 bit – but when I try to use it in Vista 64 bit it no longer seems to recognise it is present. Is PowerBoots supposed to work in 64 bit environments also?
Regards, Ken
It should work on 64 bit too (I developed it mostly on 64bit Win7 and 32bit XP) the only thing I can think of is that you’ve got an old PowerShell CTP on your 64bit, or you nested it one folder too deep in your PS “Modules” folder.
One other possibility, which just occurred to me, is that if you’re using the newer releases on PowerShell 1.0, where PoshWpf is a PSSnapin: you have to register PSSnapins and “add” them separately for 32bit and 64bit PowerShell.