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.