Why? 

I like the Notes gadget that comes with Windows Vista's new Sidebar.  I use it all the time to replace my old, ah, "organization skill" of keeping a copy of Notepad up and running in the corner of my screen with my todo list and thoughts of the day.  But every once in a while I get annoyed with it.  My basic pet peeves are:

• It's too small.  If I have more than 4-5 short lines of content, it doesn't fit.  I don't like the "add a page" mechanism -- what I want is a little more real estate.
• It doesn't roam.  I use a few computers over the course of the day.  I'd like my todo list to move around with me.

Well, I write code for a living.  If I see something I don't like I should fix it, no?  So I did.  And I thought I'd share with you my adventures along the way.

How?

I'm a developer in the Education Products group here at Microsoft.  For my day job, I play with technologies like .NET 3.0 (WPF and WCF in particular).  I figured I would go ahead and use these to create my gadget.  So my approach will be:

• Create a note taking UI using WPF, specifically an XBAP (XAML Browser Application) Page containing a RichTextBox.
• Put together the glue that will take my XBAP and expose it as a Sidebar Gadget.
• Add simple Save/Load events that store the notes to Isolated Storage on the local computer.
• Create a simple WCF Service that I can use to store my Notes on my home computer.
• Authenticate to the service using CardSpace to make sure my Todo list stays private.

I'll work through each of these steps in a series of posts that show the details of putting these technologies together.