Howto integrate Gadgets in my .NET application

Question

As there are those gadgets available for the Windows Vista Sidebar and for Windows 7, I'd really like to know if you can integrate those into your .NET app. I want a similar feature and possibly use already existing gadgets into my app.

Can it be done?

Answer 1

This is likely possible but is not going to be very easy. You're application will need to do everything that the OS would normally do to host them, including parsing the gadget manifests, setting up a web container for each to run in, calling each gadget's event handlers correctly, etc.

Basically, everything that a gadget is supposed to do to integrate with the OS, you'll 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 would be pretty cool if you can get it to work.

Have fun!

BTW, there is a W3C draft standard for widgets but it's not really practical yet. See http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/1