Here's a few tips for developers writing Sidebar gadgets that interact with Sideshow (the Windows Vista support for auxiliary displays): Early versions of the Sidebar/Sideshow documentation incorrectly refers to the enabled method as a property. The following code snippet demonstrates how to determine...

Really, this post is about Flash. But it will probably apply to quite a few other ActiveX objects out there, too, so use it liberally! Unfortunately, Adobe Flash does not support the x64 processor architecture. The basic upshot of this is that you can't view Flash content in a Sidebar Gadget if your...

One of my favorite new web technologies is now available for preview. I’d urge to you go check out the developer center and team blog . Of course, since “WPF/E” is a technology designed to work in web pages, many of you are going to try it out inside gadgets. Very cool. Unfortunately, you’ll probably...

Ben Betz has a pretty cool post about building some advanced queries in the UI ( http://shellrevealed.com/blogs/shellblog/archive/2006/10/31/Query-Composition_3A00_-Building-a-search-upon-another-search.aspx ). Did you know that you can direct the slideshow Sidebar gadget to cycle through images in...

The final RSS gadget, “Feed Headlines” is done and available with Windows Vista! This gadget is featured on the Vista Sidebar by default and allows users to see new headlines peripherally. We built the gadget using the Windows Feeds Platform, which greatly reduced the complexity of getting and storing...

DISCLAIMER: This post is relevant for the Vista v1 version of Sidebar, but isn’t guaranteed to work on future versions. Hopefully we’ll be able to devise a more streamlined method of roaming gadgets and settings in the future. Sidebar by default will use settings and gadgets that have been installed...