Yesterday (May 8th 2007) I did a presentation at VSLive in Orlando Florida on Gadgets.  Specifically Vista Sidebar Gadgets.  On stage, I build a complete Sidebar Gadget from scratch that displays information for our upcoming Silicon Valley Code Camp.  Actually, the site still refers to last year, but the web service interface has been updated to show the new date which likely will be October 27th, 2007.

The gadget that was developed in the presentation is your basic countdown gadget.  It counts down the number of days until our Silicon Valley upcoming codecamp.  The way it discovers the date of the codecamp is using ajax.net to call a web service running on localhost.  It also allows for a setting that lets you optionally turn off those annoying spinning hours, minutes and seconds.  One more thing it does is to demonstrated the ability to project a dynamic gadget.  That is, using a Gadget Flyout, it completely replaces a span element of the flyout with it’s own HTML which is retrieved again, from a web service.

Below is a picture of the gadget.  Also, I’m including a pointer to a zip file which is the gadget developed.  Since it points to localhost, it will currently not function on your system but lets you see all the techniques. Keep an eye on this blog for a real gadget that works with the real codecamp site!

Gadget Source 

(Before Class started)