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:...[Read more »]

We've seen a lot of vista sideshow-compatible boards in development, but how realistic and how hard is it to make your own custom sideshow application. The Microsoft .NET Micro Framework v2.0 is now publicly available and brings a full-featured managed code environment to a new set of applications such as home automation systems, retail displays health care monitors and maybe the most interesting and perhaps the most obvious are vista sideshow applications. ...[Read more »]

Dan Polivy, senior SideShow designer, along with Darryl Brown and Teague Mapes were kind enough to sit down with me for about 45 minutes and chat about SideShow technology. Below is an interesting Q&A about the upcoming Microsoft Vista SideShow technology, from the SideShow designers. ...[Read more »]

MSDN writes: Want to build your own gadget without having to write any real code? Sure, that may be cheating, but if you just want to get a feel for what it takes to write a gadget (it's not hard), get our Getting Started with Windows SideShow (C++) lab and follow the instructions...This lab will walk you through the important code snippets for a picture viewer gadget; in fact, the functionality is pretty much the same as our Picture Viewer gadget on the Windows SideShow Gallery at gallery.live.com.

Microsoft writes "Today's applications have lots of information to share with end users. However, screen real estate is limited and organizing all of the possible information is taxing for software developers as well as end users. Furthermore, people prioritize information in different ways and at different times. ...[Read more »]

For example, when a meeting is imminent, I need to know the time and place right now. When I'm driving, I need to know how soon to make the next turn. In general, I might want to always be able to check newly received e-mail messages. Likewise, you can imagine scenarios where I might want information on traffic, flights, weather, financial transactions, and so on. Trying to get the right information to the user at the right time is a difficult problem.

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!.