www.nickhodge.com

Paul Foster get all the cool toys. I’ve got to make do with two MINIs, a half-dozen laptops, more iPods than liv­ing souls, cam­eras, digital cam­eras, wireless…

…and Paul trumps me with a little OQO.

From Microsoft’s Cam­bridge Labs.

What an inter­est­ing day with Win­dows Vista. It is cer­tainly “pol­ished” than Win­dows 2000 and XP; things seems to be placed in logical areas. Also took the oppor­tun­ity to install Adobe Pho­toshop CS3 Beta, which worked flaw­lessly — all run­ning suc­cess­fully in Par­al­lels! Two com­puters in one is a major time saver.

It was also time to swap to Microsoft Expres­sion Web, to com­plete the Microsoft-centric devel­op­ment envir­on­ment. Expres­sion Web cer­tainly feels more pol­ished than Visual Web 2005. I hope to spend more time in this app.
Clos­ing the loop on my Thursday exper­i­ment­a­tion with live.com and Vista Side­bar gad­gets: and the res­ult is a new little gad­get I am alpha test­ing: The Neil Finn Lyric Vista gad­get.

And it looks sorta like:

Please right-click, save-as a “.gad­get”, double-click and drag and enjoy the words of one of the world’s best lyr­i­cists. Com­ments and fea­ture requests more than welcome.

Best start­ing place for the pro­ver­bial Hello World exper­i­ence for Vista Side­bar gad­gets is http://microsoftgadgets.com/Sidebar/DevelopmentOverview.aspx

Daniel Moth, from Microsoft UK has an Excel­lent screen­cast on the Chan­nel 9 site at http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=255735.These gets you going on the first part: at least get­ting your gad­get run­ning and drag and droppable.

You will need to do a little more Javas­cript, as this trig­gers events that ensure your side­bar gad­get works

http://blogs.msdn.com/sidebar/ has some more up-to date info, as the MSDN site is a little behind on updat­ing. I won­der if Microsoft is going to release an Apple Dash­code style of mini devel­op­ment applic­a­tion for wid­gets? Hope so. Whilst the devel­op­ment pro­cess is no more dif­fi­cult than simple web page design; there are many pieces of wir­ing that could be made easier with a simple builder.

Time to get ser­i­ous on my res­ol­u­tions. Well, at least one any­way; I’ll start the waist shrinking/walking later. It’s Thursday Geekout time!

Inspired by Robert Scoble’s Podtech.net live.com gad­get post­ing, and a gen­eral feel­ing that gad­gets are where it is at for non-professional pro­gram­mers like myself.

So, first port-of-call http://gallery.live.com/ then on to the Developer cen­ter

Decision time: what to gad­get up? A Cricket gad­get is under­way. I am sure that one of the vari­ous national reli­gions of foot­ball will fol­low come March. For weather I can use my real win­dow to look out­side. (note: grow­ing up on a farm, you learn to read the weather by look­ing through the win­dow at the clouds). Neil Finn Lyr­ics!

So, there is some magic back-end code that is pulling the data from a small data­base, and ren­der­ing text smartly onto a ran­dom Neil Finn image. This will be the first step. No need to con­fuse myself with too much shenanigans just yet.

Off to the Developer’s Guide, and down­load the examples from the .zip. Oooh, css xml javas­cript. Easy. I have a loc­al­host web server run­ning, so that’s no stress. Text editor open, cod­ing music in the ears.

How to test out the gad­get? OK, I need Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005. Now is a good time as any to test it out. There is a method of har­ness­ing your local gad­get to Inter­net Explorer and the live.com serv­ers to test out before embar­rass­ing your­self pub­licly! Hmm, seems like you can dir­ectly access the test har­ness with the cor­rectly formed URL. There are three ver­sions of this URL that I can find.

OK, it seems that the live.com gad­get test­ing Javas­cript har­nesses, Inter­net Explorer 7 and cross-site script­ing are in the midst of a con­spir­acy to stop test­ing. Time to hit the pro­duc­tion serv­ers with the code.

This post­ing on the new Gad­gets for­ums helps: just go straight into live.com, cross your fingers!

Works first time! After an hour of clean­ing up and renam­ing things as per the recom­mend­a­tions, here it is:

Click: live.com Neil Finn Lyric Gadget

Fur­ther com­ment live.com gad­gets are simple to cre­ate. XML file mani­fest, or list of what’s import­ant; a CSS file to style your con­tent and the Javas­cript. This Javas­cript con­tains the logic of your gad­get which is essen­tially insert­ing HTML into the stream. It can gather text extern­ally to gen­er­ate this HTML into some­thing more inter­est­ing than a picture.