Wow!

Let me, with no false modesty, just say that Øredev really rocks! I am totally mangled by a couple of really substantial and hard core seminars (more specifically the ParallellFX and ASP.NET debugging ones). This is really good and I am awfully proud to be part of the company hosting the conference. Yay!

Silverlight seminar

On friday two of my colleagues are coming up to Stockholm to give a speech on Silverlight. The title is “Silverlight - more than just awesome performance and WPF”. Come and listen you too! The seminar is for free and we’ll also throw in some yummy breakfast sandwiches if you register before the 7th of november. Read more here and register here.

Upcoming Gadget

We are gearing up for an interesting talk on Vista Sidebar Gadgets next week and I have been looking in to the technology the last few days. The sidebar is a pretty straightforward and simple way to make small applications or gadgets that reside in the sidebar or right on the Vista desktop. The only three things you need to make a complete sidebar gadget is a folder, a manifest file and a html file. It’s really that simple.

This is only where the fun begins though. The nice thing about gadgets is that you can use all the tricks and technologies that you ordinarily use in a web page. The only differences between a gadget and a web page is that the gadget doesn’t navigate and have a page history and that it runs as a fully trusted application in windows. Yes, that’s right, it’s fully trusted so you can wreak all sorts of havoc if you are so inclined or if you play with stuff that you don’t master. Take it easy!

I have been visiting the Programmable Web lately, looking through some of the interesting and fun API:s that are listed there and finally this gadget seminar gave me a reason to experiment a bit with one of them. I choose Upcoming just because I like the service a lot. It is a site that lets you register events, concerts, speaks and all other kind of meetings in a structured manner so that other people will find them. What better way to present the information from Upcoming, than by showing it in a sidebar gadget?

The Upcoming API is RESTful and thus really simple to use.  Just send away a Http GET request with the command and your API Key and you are good to go. The result is sent to you as a simple XML document.

The gadget starts by calling the event.search-method by using an asynchronous XMLHTTPRequest in the javascript. The returned response (an XML response) is parsed by the Microsoft.XmlDom activeX component and the list of event names is populated by setting the innerHTML in a <span> in the gadget html. The rest of the information for all the events are stored in a couple of arrays and the links to open the flyout contains the array index for each of the events. It may not be the most elegant solution, but it works. Maybe I’ll refactor it later, maybe not.

When one of the listed events is clicked, the flyout html is constructed and hidden in an invisible <span>-element in the gadget, waiting to be transferred to the flyout as soon as it’s done loading and triggers it’s onload event. I also added some logic for opening new events while the flyout is open and a few lines of code for a settings dialog that uses the metro.getCountryList-call to populate a simple drop down list with the countries. (Sweden is the default country when you install the gadget btw.)

I like the relative simplicity by which you can create a gadget and I will definitely try to make a few more gadgets in the future if I have some time to spend. The programmable web is filled with all kinds of interesting, useful and strange API:s to use and I really recommend you to dive into it if you are looking for inspiration or if you are into this whole Web 2.0-thing.

Download the gadget here. (And by the way: The Upcoming web API requires an API key to be usable so if you want to alter my gadget or make it into something else you’ll have to register for one and use that instead of mine. Thanks!)

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I made a Yahoo Pipe to merge the RSS-feeds from all the bloggers at Dotway. Subscribe here (and prepare to read some really amazing blog posts from a brilliant team of tech heads).