How to integrate gadgets in my .NET application

Question

As there are those gadgets that are available for the Windows Vista sidebar and for Windows 7, I would really like to know if you can integrate them into your .NET application. I want a similar feature and maybe use existing gadgets in my application.

Can this be done?

Answer 1

It is possible, but it will not be so simple. You need to do everything that the OS will usually do to host them, including parsing gadget manifests, setting up a web container for each launch, correctly accessing each gadget event handler, etc.

In principle, everything that a gadget needs to do to integrate with the OS, you will need to support. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965850%28v=VS.85%29.aspx

This is not a project for the faint of heart, but it will be pretty cool if you can get it to work.

Good luck

By the way, there is a W3C draft standard for widgets, but so far this is not very practical. See http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/ 1