I did Two Shoes Weekend II: The Shoesening

Two Shoes Weekend is an event put on by my friend Casey. The basic idea is that you do two projects (two shoes if you will) over a weekend. It is inspired by Shoes, which is a _why the Lucky Stiff thing, but you don't have to use Shoes. This is the second run of two shoes weekend. Last time I almost did something, but I got distracted. At the time, I was using Vista (mock my operating system all you want, it's not germane to story time), and the Windows version of shoes had some issues there. Specifically, the background of the window was an inky black darkness, impervious to light. You could "fix" this problem by lying to Shoes, and saying you were XP. Unfortunately, this triggered the Vista bug that the code that created the inky blackness was designed to avoid, an abominable amount of flickering that would give you a headache. Part of my day job involves wrangling GDI and windows so I started to take a look at the code. I didn't really accomplish anything by doing this, and the weekend largely ended with me having little to nothing to show for it.

This year, I decided to avoid that whole class of problem by making one of my shoes shoes itself. More specifically, I took one part IronRuby, and one part WPF and whipped up a reasonable facisimle of Shoes. It has the "advantage" of being pure ruby since the IronRuby guys did all the work of binding ruby to the CLR for me, and the WPF guys did all the hard work of implementing the moral equivalent of "slots" for me. I took a rather haphazard approach though, basically implementing the bits that were needed for some initial sample projects. It wasn't until relatively late in the weekend that I actually started going through the manual and adding the features in the right way. It will probably never replace real Shoes for Shoes use case, for one thing you have to install IronRuby to run it, but it is sort of interesting for slapping a GUI on to some existing .NET functionality perhaps. Shoes seems remarkably well-suited for being implemented in WPF, stack might as well be a StackPanel, and flow might as well be a WrapPanel, and that's what I did really. WPF's pervasive tendency to use URIs might things like image "http://thing.png" worked with almost no effort on my part.

My second shoe was pretty boring, but I felt compelled to do two. I made a "lonely blog", aka a diary. It displays a stream of text and images that it saves/loads from a local file on your computer. It looks like this:

You enter either image urls or commentary and click the appropriate button. The save button saves the blog, and the entries will appear the next time you load it.

All in all, a fun time. I haven't done anything in Ruby in a while so that was fun. The code for the WPF/IronRuby shoes work-a-like is here, and the lonelyblog shoes app is here.