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Windows Development (Vista / 7) Gadgets

Apart from seemingly a few, I don't know much about how gadgets work. Are they ad-hoc apps or regular apps with custom styled windows?

I can't think of any application I'm using that asked me if I wanted to install the gadget ... I would have thought that any application that usually stays running all the time would be fine ... Skype / MSN for example. Am I misunderstanding the gadgets, or are they not popular?

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Windows Desktop Gadgets are quite a few built-in Internet Explorer windows (if you are using Visual Studio you can use Spy ++ to find this).

As with any widget system, they are very useful for displaying information, providing shortcuts, or quick ways to complete repetitive tasks. There are a number of examples out there, including some of mine that I won't post here as spam - on the Windows Live Gallery .

The gadget structure is simply a folder, exactly terminated .gadget

, containing an XML manifest document and at least one html file (which the XML document refers to).

The API works with scripts running on the gadget in the form of a namespace that provides access to methods that are not normally available to scripts.

To answer another question, most desktop persistence applications already had the means to do so before gadgets appeared on Windows. Most of the gadgets are created by hobby developers, but I've seen some examples of gadgets that came with applications (one of the CD / DVD creation software titles did that, not sure what ). One of the obstacles is the lack of a gadget for application-based interaction and communication, which is difficult to do even with JScript COM support. Windows 7 introduced an interface for adding a gadget to the user's desktop that helps in at least one aspect.



After revising this answer, I decided to look for the apps that I saw when installing gadgets. So far I have found two unrelated because I don't want this to be considered spam:

  • Nero DiscCopy Gadget (included with Nero 7)
  • TuneUp Gadget (part of TuneUp utilities)

Another reading:

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