Creating a Sidebar gadget for Windows Vista

With the widest release ever for Microsoft Vista Worldwide, 2007 opens the door to an era of gadget development. The gadgets are small, lightweight, but powerful applications that remain in the sidebar of Windows Vista. The best thing about a gadget is not dependent on any particular language or technology, and not take a genius to create a gadget. A basic knowledge of HTML and JavaScript have to do, but you may also program in any language for Microsoft Windows and the Web to extend a gadget. Once you know the basic rules of gadget development, only the sky is the limit for productivity and innovation.

This article describes a simple Windows Vista Sidebar gadget that delivers daily Dilbert cartoon on your desktop.

RSS is available feedburner.com which gives you a daily Dilbert content and format XML files. The idea is to read the file, analyzes the content and display it in the right sidebar. The user can view the cartoons last 5 days. The advantage is, for all those (like me) who want to start there day Dilbert strip, do not need to go to the website or even open the feed, to see it. Click the date in the sidebar and the gadget displays a pop-up sticker of the day.

This article also discusses five common features of Sidebar Gadget Development:

1. Create: A simple gadget with minimum files

2. Use Ajax: Read the XML file, Web (RSS) Get and parse the RSS feed for the comic strip Dilbert

3. Parse XML: Extract the path of the image

4. Rich display: the gadget

5. Flyout: A simple implementation of Windows Sidebar to see the picture flyout