Creating Vista Sidebar Gadgets in Visual Studio (C#) – The Getting Started Guide

CodeProject - Create a Vista Gadget using Visual Studio IDE

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An absence of any tools in Visual Studio that can help for developers to create Vista Gadget is strange and disapointed surprise from guys from Microsoft, by my opinion. May be its a temporary situation, but for now, I want to show you some tools that can help develop Vista gadget using Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008. This tools include Visual Studio template for begin creating Vista Gadget and Visual Studio Add-In for creating .gadget file from project and run gadget installation.

Background

For now if we want to create Vista gadget we should follow next process:
1. Create all needed folder and important files in some folder.
2. Create zip archive from all folders and files that should be included in the gadget.
3. Change .zip to .gadget extension for archived file.
4. Run this file using double click for starting process of gadget installation.
All this process required if we want to share your gadget with some people.
We haven't now any tools that can help us for develop Vista Gadget using Visual Studio. In this article I suggest you use Visual Studio template for point 1 and automate points 2-4 using Visual Studio Add-In. Both Visual Studio template and Visual Studio Add-In I prepared for you and try further to explain how to use their.

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This article seems like a nice getting started guide to get going writing a Vista Sidebar gadget with Visual Studio