Update on the Outlook Gadgets

Well, after two days out in the wild, some reports are coming in of problems with the gadgets.  We've isolated these problems down to two known issues:

• The gadgets don't appear to do anything on computers with a UI language other than English
• The appointments gadget incorrectly displays appointments if the locale settings of the machine are set to a locale that has a different date/time formatting than US English.

Unfortunately the first bug is by design for now, because the gadget is only available currently on English builds of Windows.  However, if you want to "go it alone" check out this comment posted over on Melissa's blog, which indicates one way to get support for your language.

The second issue is unfortunately something that slipped through our design and testing and is related to the way Outlook handles date/time formatting.  For those developers in the audience, Outlook uses locale-specific date/time formatting in DASL and JET restrictions, which means that it can be difficult to generate specific date time restrictions in a deterministic way.  However, for the gadgets I've come up with a workaround and we're validating the fix and resting the gadgets and with the plan to have an updated version of the gadget available soon.

I'll let you know as soon as we have an update available.

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 14, 2006
  Updated gadgets are now available on the Windows Live Gallery (http://gallery.microsoft.com/).

• Anonymous
  February 11, 2007
  Hi, What about makeing a gadgets that allows you to search you Outlook contacts, the way the pre installed gadget in Windows allows you to search the Windons Contacts. Regards Øyvind

• Anonymous
  March 04, 2007
  I agree! I would love to see a Outlook 2007 Contacts gadget that would let me search or keep a running list of a certain category/folder of contacts. Or instructions on how to make the built-in one retrieve Outlook data :) Please and thanks :)