Windows Sidebar and Gadgets...

Attended a session on creating Sidebar gadgets today. A Windows Gadget can be either a WPF (Avalon) application or a DHTML page, and is simply a packaged .gadget file that contains the following items:

- The XAML/C# application itself, or the DHTML page and associated resources (images etc.)
- An XML file that describes the gadget, the author, the version of the gadget and the version of Sidebar that it's designed to work with, and other settings that determine the runlevel for security.
- A PNG icon that's displayed in the gadget picker.

The goal is to bridge the gap between Start.com and Sidebar gadgets as far as possible; i.e., you should be able to create DHTML gadgets that work on Start.com as well as on your desktop - in the Sidebar or as separate entities. The method used to build gadgets for Sideshow, the auxiliary display system, is different at this time and gadgets built for one cannot be used with the other as a result.

Here are some pictures showing a Launcher (similar to the current quick launch bar, but prettier), the fancy WMP gadget that we first saw in the keynote presentation on Tuesday, a mailbox gadget that displays a summary of new messages in your inbox, and the gadget picker that displays all the available gadgets that can be added to the Sidebar.




Sidebar: coming soon to an XP box near you!

One significant announcement that was made during the session was that the Sidebar is being backported to XP as well. This was seen by most attendees as a good move, since it'll only help to speed up the development of gadgets by the community and third-party developers.

Here's a picture of the Sidebar running on XP. Notice the build tag on the lower-right hand corner of the screen:



Tags: Vista, Longhorn, Sidebar, Gadgets, PDC05