More Vista SideShow gadgets available for download

Posted by dragos on 03-09-2007 in How To's | Writing Gadgets

A Windows SideShow gadget is a piece of code running on the Windows Vista platfom and sends informtion to a hardware display device. If you running Windows Vista, in the Windows SideShow Control Panel applet, you will see the list of SideShow gadgets and SideShow hardware devices installed on the system. By default, Windows vista ships with two sideshow gadgets and one with Microsoft® Office Outlook 2007:

Inbox—Windows Mail
Windows Media Player
Office Outlook® 2007 Calendar

Want more SideShow gadgets? You may find interesting the sideshow section on the Windows Live Gallery! where you can download sideshow gadgets such us Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds viewer, control music playback, photo slide show viewer and so on.

sideshow panel

WeatherBug is one of the first live local weather provider that announced availability of online Windows Vista-Certified Sideshow gadget. The WeatherBug Vista Gadget is a desktop application and WeatherBug Vista Gadget. Available for free, this application supports Windows Vista Sideshow allowing Windows users to view weather information even when their laptop or PC is turned off. Windows Vista users can download WeatherBug at http://vista.weatherbug.com and from the Windows Live Gallery.

Are you a developer looking for gadgets to run in these Windows SideShow ? If you're looking to writing your own gadget for Windows SideShow, I recommend checking out this artilces You will find how you can develop test and configure a sideshow gadget using Visual Studio 2005. Also you may check this gadget available for download at codeprojects.com. Very important, don't forget to take a look at Writing Sideshow gadget section.

If you already are working on Windows Vista you should know the Microsoft made SideShow really accessible with the SideShow .NET Framework Components 1.0 beta. This download enables developers to build compelling applications to support Windows SideShow-compatible devices. Users are required to install this component in order to run gadgets that have been built using the component.

I'm sure that very soon we will see some very interesting and creative sideshow applications. And the most important, once you've developed your first Windows SideShow gadget, consider sharing it others on Windows Live Gallery so other Windows SideShow users can enjoy it and may be drop me an email at or use the our contact form. Lots of cool stuff happening with Windows SideShow!