Countdown Timer

Spent a fair few hours today designing a countdown timer in C#. Admittedly, I could have had a working product within about 10 minutes if all I'd wanted was a nice little string that told me how many days, hours, minutes and seconds we were currently away from a certain deadline, but I decided I might as well do a nice job of it as I was bored.

As such, I've coded a nice, robust app, with pretty code (no hacking!) behind it all. I won't put it up for download just yet as I'm still getting people to send in picture themes for it to be customised - I might try and do it as a Vista gadget next too.

I've never had an application run from the system tray before, so that took a bit of getting used to - I had to code up my own ApplicationContext instead of just relying on Application.Run()'s default, which took a fair bit of playing around with.

Two great things I found whilst making this app:

1) QTam's free Bitmap to Icon converter.

2) An ingenious AlphaBlendTextBox control for VS, which allows for transparent backgrounds to textboxes. It's not perfect, but it's pretty damn close, very impressed.

Here's a screenie of the program, skinned with a crappy picture theme I made:



I'm hoping to get some good picture themes sent in soon, to replace my rubbish :)

If you fancy submitting a theme, then I need 10 pictures for the numbers, each 50 x 50 pixels, and one background image, preferably 450x300, unless you think it would look good tiled/stretched.