Vista Sidebar Gadgets

Last month I did a webcast on Vista Sidebar Gadgets and how you can use them to extend the reach of your software solutions, either by augmenting a desktop or web-based solution or to act as an innovative way to advertise your product or solution in a viral or word-of-mouth manner.

I'll admit that I'm late in writing this post, but as the saying goes, "better late than never!".  In any case, the webcast seemed to generate a lot of interest in pursuing some of the ideas I presented in the webcast, so consider this post as a follow-up to those comments and questions.

First off, there were some requests for good guidance on how to create great gadgets that link into services on the web.  Some fellow Microsoft colleagues by the name of Tim Heuer (in the US) and Mike Ormond (in the UK) have some great posts on how to create web-connected gadgets.  Definitely worth the read:

• Tim Heuer's Gadget Posts
  • Developing a Vista Sidebar Gadget, Part 1
  • Developing a Vista Sidebar Gadget, Part 2
  • Don't like JavaScript?  Try Script# to build gadgets (Script# converts C# to JS).  Here is a great example.  And here is the follow-up post on some fixes Tim made to it.
• Mike Ormond's Gadget Posts
  • So You Want to Build a Vista Sidebar Gadget?
  • Take Our Gadget, Give it a Design
  • Make Our Gadget Do Something Useful
  • Screencasts for Mike's posts:  https://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/screencasts/search-results.aspx?q=sidebar

Also, if you're looking for the deck from the webcast with more resources, you can download it here.  It's in PowerPoint 2007 format, so if you're using a previous version of Office, you can download the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack to view it.

Finally, if you were interested in the Weather Network gadget, you can get the English version here and the French version here.  If you're interested in the Astrographer gadget I had created and dissected in the webcast, you can get it here (and a previous version of the gadget can be downloaded here).

Paul

<UPDATED January 11, 2008: Corrected the fact Mike Ormond is from the UK, not the US, and added the screencast links to his blog posts on gadgets./>

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  January 09, 2008
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  January 11, 2008
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