After posting my snowflake sample on Friday, I decided I wanted to make it a gadget since that was actually my intention with the WPF version, but WPF gadgets aren’t easy. However, putting a Silverlight in the sidebar is very easy (As long as you are not running 64-bit, which I am at home)

Simply copy the html page and the xap to a directory, and add a gadget.xml document with the basic info. Here’s the one I used.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<gadget>
  <name>Snowflakes</name>
  <namespace>
    <!--_locComment_text="{Locked}"-->microsoft.windows
  </namespace>
  <version>
    <!--_locComment_text="{Locked}"-->1.0.0.0
  </version>
  <author name="Chris Szurgot">
    <info url="http://blogs.msdn.com/szurgot" text="Chris's Blog"/>
  </author>
  <description>Silverlight Snowflakes</description>
  <icons>
    <icon height="125" width="125" src="snowflakes.jpg"/>
  </icons>
  <hosts>
    <host name="sidebar">
      <base type="HTML" apiVersion="1.0.0" src="snowflakes.html"/>
      <permissions>
        <!--_locComment_text="{Locked}"-->Full
      </permissions>
      <platform minPlatformVersion="0.3"/>
      <defaultImage src="Icon.jpg"/>
    </host>
  </hosts>
</gadget>

The only other important change is to the html file. Change the source of the silverlight object to includ x-gadget.

x-gadget:///snowflakes.xap

Add an icon image if uou want one (it will show up in the “Add Gadgets” screen) and zip up all of the files into a file called name.gadget.

I’ve put together a gadget install here.

I will admit it’s not much, but it paves the way for some of the other stuff I have planned.