Since today Windows Vista and Office 2007 is broadly available for end consumers and I'm really excited about the first feedback of the end users at home.

One new feature of Vista is the Sidebar and its Gadgets, a kind of small applications running on the desktop. In the next couple of weeks I'm going to prepair my session ("Vista Development") for a conference taking place in a couple of locations in Austria. Gadgets will be one part of that, so I really would like to show a very cool Gadget and how easily this is could be done.

If you like to start developing Vista Gadgets, having some experience in Web development would definitive help. However a good start are the following links:

Overview: http://microsoftgadgets.com/Sidebar/DevelopmentOverview.aspx

Windows Sidebar Reference, API: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/sidebar/sidebar/reference/refs.asp

Guide, Part 1 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/vista/gadgets-pt1.mspx

I'll post a cool Gadget using Outlook API in the next couple of days, maybe others will follow :)