Read Daniel Moth's excellent series of articles (3 so far) about Vista SideShow Gadget Fundamentals, an Introduction to SideShow, and Designing SideShow Gadgets with SCF. Despite the fact that no SideShow hardware exists commercially, Microsoft has released a good Sideshow simulator. The simulator is part of the Microsoft Vista SideShow SDK. More information abou this SDK can be found at the MSDN website. Daniedl Moth is a Software (Developer, Engineer, Consultant, Evangelist, Designer) focusing on the Microsoft platform (and in particular .NET). Indeed, Daniel's enthusiams qualifies him as a excellent Evangelist!.