Ryan Cromwell » Vista Sidebar http://blog.cromwellhaus.com Improving my craft... Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:06:59 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Vista Sidebar Gadget Developer Experience http://blog.cromwellhaus.com/2007/05/vista-sidebar-gadget-developer-experience/ http://blog.cromwellhaus.com/2007/05/vista-sidebar-gadget-developer-experience/#comments Wed, 02 May 2007 02:58:18 +0000 cromwellryan /blogs/ryanc/archive/2007/05/02/vista-sidebar-gadget-developer-experience.aspx Vista Sidebar Gadgets can be cool, but the developer experience out of the box is severely lacking.  Microsoft doesn’t provide a Visual Studio project template, so Tim Heuer was nice enough to provide one for us.  He does so via a Web Site template, which makes sense since a Sidebar gadget is nothing more than an Html page with a splash of JavaScript, minimally, of course.  If you are like me, you like to be able to touch something up and then look at it, but I’m not about to edit, copy, run every time I want to see what my little icon change has affected.  Here’s a tip to help you out: create a symbolic link in your %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets directory.  Here’s how:

    1. Run Command Prompt as an Administrator
    2. mklink /D “%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\<gadgetname>.gadget” “%userprofile%\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\WebSites\<VisualStudioProjectDirectory>”

This allows you to keep your projects where they belong (VS won’t let you open a folder in AppData without jumping some hoops anyway) and still reload your Gadget in Sidebar whenever you make changes.

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