Create Vista Sidebar Gadgets

I used this example at the ITWorx Blog.

I have had on my XP Active Desktop 4 small windows containing simple web pages. One displayed some data, one a weather radar loop, and the other two were webcam images from the outside (no windows in the office). It is nice to be able to see what is going out in the real world.

Well...work changed over to Vista for no good reason...well other than the obvious disasters with the migration...

Of course, Vista doesn't have Active Desktop...but after some research I found that the Vista Sidebar will allow almost the exact same results. I say almost, because I could resize the windows as I needed on XP, but the Sidebar only allows fixed sizes...so I had to do some trial and error resizing.

The example I used above didn't exactly work out of the box...but it was a good starting point. I ended up locating the Gadgets folder (mine was in C:Program Files/Windows Sidebar) taking a look at a couple of the gadgets in there and editing the linked example to match what is there.

But bottom line, it is simple to convert existing websites to work on the Sidebar.