Update: We had a small hiccup with the build that went on Windows Live Gallery but this has been fixed and re-uploaded. Sorry to anyone that downloaded the non-working version.

Auction Sidebar Tool 2.91 has just been accepted onto Windows Live Gallery and is now available for download.  This new release adds a few new features as well as some behind the scenes bug fixes and improvements.  New features in this release are as follows:

• Integration with the eBay Client Alerts API - this new feature allows us to connect to eBay's services more frequently and efficiently to update item and My eBay bidding, watching and selling list statuses.
• Basic list sorting - You can now right click and sort item lists by ascending or descending order based on item price, title or time left.
• New loading method for .NET extensions.

Read on for more information or download now from Windows Live Gallery.

Good news everyone.  We finally got finished with Auction Sidebar Tool v2.9 and it has been uploaded to Windows Live Gallery.  Primarily, the purpose of the new version was to fix the connection issues everyone's been having.  Couple this with the recent fixes I put out on the server and hopefully everyone will be connection issue free now. 

Download now or read on for what's new and improved.

On Friday evening I added a fix for Auction Sidebar Tool on the server.  Although it's still too early to tell for sure, I successfully ran the gadget all day Saturday with no issues retrieving feedback score, searching or viewing items.  Fingers crossed everyone and please let me know if these problems have disappear for you or if they are still as bad as ever.

 That all being said, our server is still having issues.   We're still working hard to fix these issues, read on for more details.

Last night on the Auction Sidebar Tool support forum, a few users started a thread regarding issues they were having with retrieving feedback scores from eBay.  This problem is caused by Auction Sidebar Tool reaching an imposed daily limit on the requests it can make to eBay's Developer APIs.  This means you might be lucky enough not to have noticed the issue, depending on the part of the world you live in and the times of day you use Auction Sidebar Tool.  How do we know this is the problem?  Well, a few days ago I received an email from Zhuowei Yang, one of the staff at eBay Developer Support.  The email reported a large jump in our API requests and notified us of the restriction they were placing on Auction Sidebar Tool's usage allowances.

It's important to note that this issue will also affect eBay time synchronisation, so those users counting down the seconds for that final bid should be aware that AuctionST's time may not be accurate enough for sniping.

Read on for the contents of the email, our attempt to fathom the issue and our intent to resolve it.

It's been a while since my last post (almost three months!).  I apologize for this, I've been rather busy.

This post is regarding a security issue I discovered when researching methods of displaying third party websites within a frame in the gadget or a flyout window.  If you don't already know, Windows Desktop Gadgets are built on Internet Explorer technology.  They are actually mini Internet Explorer windows and are subject to the same security settings as Internet Explorer.  They run in the Internet security zone, just like websites that haven't been added to the trusted or restricted security zones.

Being in the Internet security zone, gadgets would normally be unable to perform certain tasks, like communicating across domains with web requests, running ActiveX controls or accessing the clipboard without first asking the user.  In order to get around this problem, gadgets force these settings to allow these actions to be performed programmatically with no prompting.  They do this for gadget, settings and flyout windows and any windows hosted within, including frames and inline frames.

An update to the National Lottery Results gadget just got accepted onto Windows Live Gallery.  This fixes the never-changing "Loading..." message that you might be seeing on all older versions.

Quite recently, Camelot Plc made some rather large changes to the National Lottery website.  The first thing I did was tested the gadget to make sure it still did and it worked fine.  Alas, it seemed they weren't finished with the site and they later changed the URL for the draw history downloads, thus breaking the gadget (the nerve!).  It was pretty tricky to find the new URLs, the draw history links on the new site are the same as the old ones and produce an error.  Luckily, Google helped out a little bit.

I sincerley apologise for not picking up on this quicker.  I imagine my tests were a day or two early otherwise we could have had this fix out a couple of weeks ago.  Many thanks to Stephen and Roy for the necessary kick up the back-side!

I also tidied the code a little, if any developers or would-be developers are taking a look.

Update: Stephen got back to me to mention that he could no longer choose which game results were displayed.  This was my fault - I messed up the settings page without realizing.  The great thing about this was I caught another bug; National Lottery had slightly changed the format of their draw history CSV files, causing the gadget to parse the 4th most recent result instead of the latest one (eek!).

Download National Lottery Results Gadget from Windows Live Gallery

A couple of updates sneaked onto Windows Live Gallery over the past few days, but I haven't had time to post an announcement until now.  So first things last:

The second of the updates was for Play.com Search, and went live today.  Nothing major here folks, Play.com terminated their affiliate program with Tradedoubler which stopped the gadget from working altogether.  We know there were quite a few users so we made the decision to update it.  The new version uses new links, and some behind the scenes code changes improve efficiency and Windows 7 support.

The first update was for Postage Calculator (UK), which has seen its biggest update since the initial release in October 2006.  Not only are the prices updated for April 2009, but it's grown by almost quarter of an inch to accomodate a new box and it's also sprouted international postage rate calculation and full keyboard accessibility.  Get the full run down by clicking the read link.

Download Play.com Search from Windows Live Gallery
Download Postage Calculator (UK) from Windows Live Gallery

The Amazon Sidebar Tool has had a small update once again to fix a fairly problematic issue related to purchasing items. It should all be perfect now though. Here's a list of what's changed:

 - Fixed purchasing items through the gadget
 - Support for mp3s added
 - Carts and search results now clear when changing countries

Download from Windows Live Gallery

The owner of discountcodes.co.uk got in touch yesterday to let us know that the gadget wasn't working.  Fortunately, he'd already done most of the leg work in finding out the problem.

It turned out that Feedburner, who were hosting the feed that the gadget uses, had moved all their feeds from http://feeds.feedburner.com to a new url, http://feeds2.feedburner.com.  They did set up a forwarding header to direct browsers and feed readers from the old URL to the new URL and in certain situations a gadget's request to a URL would follow a forwarding header.  Unfortunately, this wasn't one of those situations; a request from a gadget will not follow a forwarding header to a different domain or subdomain, it just stops completely with no information on which URL it should have been directed to.

Without being able to access the feed, all of the discountcodes.co.uk gadgets already downloaded are rendered useless.  We've updated the gadget to use the new feed URL and we have a method on how we can make a request that will follow forwarding headers to other domains, it just requires a bit more testing before we start using it.

 You can download the updated version of DiscountCodes.co.uk Latest Offers from Windows Live Gallery.

Just a quick announcement.  Julie, our website manager and my partner, is running Cancer Research UK's Race For Life in memory of her great Aunt who died last year.  Julie has had a hand in some of our gadget designs, and a lot of her input went into gadgets like Auction Sidebar Tool and Amazon Sidebar Tool.

We don't normally ask for donations from our users, but since this is for charity we thought it couldn't hurt :-)  If you get a lot of use out of any of our gadgets and you'd like to support Julie in her Race For Life, you can visit her sponsorship page at http://www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/julierhodes. Remember, it's for a good cause and no amount is too small.