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This Friday I will be giving a web presentation on building a Silverlight-based Windows Vista gadget for Radio & TV Stations. When you build a Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget, you can package it as either a .zip archive or a .cab archive and then change the extension to .gadget. Here's how you determine which method to use:
- Use .cab files when you need to digitally sign the package or if you want to use Visual Studio as a build system to create the gadget.
- Use .zip files when you want to create the packages with other tools (like WinZip, PKZip). Windows Vista also has native support for creating zip files. Zip archives cannot be signed.
When reading the documentation for building Sidebar Gadgets on MSDN, I didn't see the steps for using Visual Studio to build gadget .cab files, so I added it to the documentation myself (see the bottom of this page). This is actually something that anyone with a Live ID can do. At the bottom of the page in MSDN Documentation, there is a Community Content section where you can add your comments. As we are always trying to improve our developer documentation, this is a great way for the .Net developer community to help.
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When I was running the Mindjet Labs, I frequently posted solutions that showed off the power of the MindManager solution platform. In January 2007, I posted an integration between Mindjet MindManager and OneNote 2007 and I was pleasantly surprised to see that there were 100 downloads of the solution in the first 24 hours. To me, this was very impressive with a user base of 850,000 MindManager users at the time with only a fraction of which who were using OneNote 2007. This solution took me about a week to develop and really showed a great synergy between OneNote 2007 and MindManager.
Yesterday I posted my first Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget, Radio Stations, a simple pushbutton internet radio station tuner and in the first 24 hours there were more than 1,200 downloads. The gadget took about a day to develop but it was downloaded 12 times as many times than the OneNote + MindManager integration. It might be obvious, but here are the factors that I think contribute to exponentially greater downloads of the Vista Sidebar gadget.
- Number of people who are using Vista compared to the number of people who are using MindManager Pro 6 and OneNote 2007
- The Sidebar gadget gallery in Vista has a Get more gadgets online link whereas there is no such link in MindManager.
- The process to download and try a gadget is very easy: you just click on the download link, click through the warnings (after sending them to your attorney for review) and it's intstalled.
This being so, I think that companies like Mindjet should be releasing small solutions like Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets and Windows Live gadgets to be able to "create bite-sized chunks" in order to drive awareness and adoption of their great products.
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One of the things that I have learned over my career is that "one thing leads to another" and your life is a series of linked events in a chain. If you are unwilling to follow your heart you often cannot see the next link in the chain. My life has had this chain:
- Computer Geek
- Architecture Student
- Architecture/Computer Graduate Student
- CAD software developer
- CAD software architect
- Software development manager
- Business solutions architect
- Technical Evangelist
This was at a macro scale, but I like to change scale and see the micro scale of the chain of everyday activities that takes place for me in my role as a new Developer Evangelist at Microsoft:
- Start a Blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/Synergist.
- Get an email about the blog from Blake Handler, an MVP.
- Go to his website, The Road to Know Where and see that he works for CBS radio he has a list of radio stations on his site.
- I start thinking that an internet radio tuner would be a cool Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget.
- Send him an email introducing myself and asking about what he does.
- I start reading about developing sidebar gadgets and find that I can use my HTML, CSS, and JavaScript knowledge (it's that easy) to develop something pretty cool.
- Independenly Blake sends me an email saying it would be great to have a sidebar gadget with the CBS radio stations on it - we are on the same page!
- I spend a few hours to create my first gadget which I will post shortly:
- What will be the next link in this chain?
The gadget is now on the Windows Live Gallery!
