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.

We have quite a few prototype/early development stage gadgets here and prioritizing them is a pretty tricky task.  Since there are a lot of gadgets out there, we prefer to focus on gadgets that haven't been done yet, or gadgets that we know can be better than similar gadgets we see out there.  Covering the first of those two criteria is our Magnifier gadget, whilst our Colour Picker (tentative name) tries to do something that's been done, but in a better (read: more convenient) way.

Both gadgets use our custom-built ActiveX controls to perform their main tasks.  For the non-technical minded; gadgets are quite limited in the tasks they can perform, on their own they don't nearly have the same capabilities of a full-blown application.  An ActiveX control allows us to even the playing field against desktop apps, whilst taking advantage of the gadget's small nature and constant desktop presence to beat them with convenience.

Hit the read link to find out more about these gadgets.

One of the things we spend a lot of time on here is ways to make our lives easier while developing.  DropTo->Gadget is just one of the tools we've developed so that we can spend more time actually coding and less time on the annoying, repetitive tasks.

XMLSettingsTransform is another example, and it works so well that we want to share it with other developers.  You might be wondering what XMLSettingsTransform is now and possibly the easiest way for me to summarize it is to say that it's a script that transforms XML into a settings dialog for your gadget.  The result is a familiar and consistent layout across all your gadgets, with advanced user interface elements and behaviors such as tab strips, combo boxes and spin controls that can automatically disable themselves if another setting has (or doesn't have) a specific value.

For the end user, this consistency makes for a comfortable environment in which they can customize the gadget, especially if you use the authentic looking custom controls that match controls used in Windows Vista dialogs.  For the developer, it makes writing the settings a breeze.  There's no HTML or styling involved (unless you decide not to use the default stylesheet) and there's no need to write even a single line of code.

Read on for a more detailed description of the features.  You can also see a working example of XMLSettingsTransform in the latest version of Amazon Sidebar Tool.

Recently, we were contacted by the owner of a popular voucher codes site in the UK.  They were interested in having a Windows gadget to display the latest voucher codes from their RSS feeds.

The gadget has been on Windows Live Gallery for about a week now, but I wanted to discuss some of the non-standard features we implemented to make it stand out from other RSS gadgets.

The most obvious feature you'll recognize is the advertisement at the bottom.  This isn't a feature you'd normally see in one of our gadgets, but was specifically requested by discountcodes.co.uk.  We did our best to make the advert as unobtrusive as possible, taking up just a small portion of the gadget right at the bottom.  The advert image and link will change around every hour.

My personal favourite feature is the scroll bar (probably because I wrote the class for it).  This isn't currently on our other RSS feed gadgets, they (and other RSS gadgets I've seen) split the feed up into pages with left/right buttons to switch pages.  I think that a scroll bar improves user interaction with a gadget, mostly because you can use the mouse wheel and up/down keys to quickly find the information you're looking for.

The third feature I wanted to bring your attention to was auto-scrolling when idle.  This means when you don't interact with the gadget, after a short period of time it will scroll a small amount.  The gadget will continue scrolling at short intervals until you interact with the gadget once more.  The obvious benefit to this is that you can periodically glance at the gadget and it would show you different parts of the feed at different times.

Other, standard features in this gadget include docked & undocked sizes, a search box linked to discountcodes.co.uk's site search and a short preview avaiable in undocked mode.

Anyone who would like to take a look can head over to the gadget's page on Windows Live Gallery.