Jamie and I were chatting yesterday morning about Vista Sidebar Gadgets when he sent me a link to the Sidebar Gadget Development MSDN Forum where chemgirl had posted a new thread "Can someone make a gadget for us chemistry students". I read the post and had a look around the Apple Dashboard Widgets page and found the "The Periodic Table" widget written by Chris Fennell.
Now I have been pondering for a while about writing a tool that will convert Dashboard Widgets into Sidebar Gadgets and I have been looking for an example to play with that will highlight some of the processes that a tool will have to perform in order to convert from one to another and what happens if you want to invert the process and go from a Gadget to a Widget?? A couple of months ago I attempted to convert some Gadgets that I had written to Widgets but all the Gadgets used IE7's RSS platform and this just made it all more difficult.
I was having a couple of problems with Threading in WPF so I thought that I would allow myself a lunch break and see if I could convert the Widget to a Gadget during lunch.
Rather quickly I was up and running and had managed to convert the Widget to a Gadget. The steps that I followed were:-
- Create the .xml file to and update the.
- Identify and then Modify the main .js and add some specific Gadget calls to ensure that the size dimensions are correct.
- Add the images and modify references.
- Modify the css where necessary.
- Repackage the gadget.
There is some Fit and Finish to be added to the Gadget, however I ran out of time. There is also the issue of design guidelines that are enforced by Microsoft which are not strictly adhered to. So I have a simple process that I can attempt to code up and run against other Widgets in an attempt at converting Widgets to Gadgets. I will keep you posted as to my progress in this area.
Chemgirl I hope that this helps you out. I have attached the gadget for download.