CodeClimber

As I anticipated a few days ago, I'm trying to install Win2008 on my MacBook, and one of the things I was really missing from Vista was the Sidebar, mainly because I got a few request for enhancements for my CCNET Sidebar Gadget and I wanted to work on it a bit in order to make it better (hoping MS will not drop the only useful feature they added to Vista). But the Sidebar doesn't run smoothly on Win2008 from inside Fusion: I followed the instructions on how to install it, and it works with "local-only" gadgets but the ones that...

After coming back from my long weekend in Barcelona I finally uploaded the slides and demos of the presentation I held two weeks ago at the XeDotNet user group meeting about Developing Vista Sidebar Gadgets. The presentation and the demos take you step by step in the creation of a Vista Sidebar Gadget, starting from a basic gadget to a full-blown localized gadget, with settings, flyout and undocked view: basic gadget adding transparent background adding a Settings page adding the Undocked view adding a Flyout getting ready for localization Since I used a Mac, the main presentation is Keynote format,...

I just came back from the post-event dinner, and here some picture of the presentation on Vista Gadgets running on a MacBook.     Not many people attended the presentation: too close to the end of the summer season, and probably not many people likes Vista. But I think this evening I showed some good reasons why developing Vista Sidebar Gadgets matters. I received some good questions from the elite that listened to my 2 hours long presentation, some of which are still unanswered. I promise I'll look for some answers and post them on my...

Tomorrow evening I'm going to do a presentation about Developing Gadgets for the Vista Sidebar at the XeDotNET user group in Venice. What are Sidebar Gadgets Why developing Sidebar Gadgets Structure of a Gadget How to develop a Gadget (with 6 demos) Tips&Tricks And since my laptop cannot run Vista, I'll do the presentation using my wife's MacBook, running Vista inside Parallels. If you are interested in coming, you can register here: the presentation is in Mestre, on Friday September 16th starting from 7:30pm. Next week I'll upload the slides (in Italian) and the demos. Technorati tags: sidebar, gadget, vista

One of the new cool features of the new Orcas TFS is the Team Build Job, which adds a kind of Continuous Integration to Team Foundation Server. Jim Lamb, PM of this new feature, just released a Vista Sidebar Gadget that lets you monitor the builds happening on one server. The screenshot at the right looks pretty familiar to me. This gadget doesn't have an undocked view with more details about all the projects, but uses the flyout to show more details of a specific project then you click on the project name. You can look at a preview of...

Another weekend, another release: today is the turn of my CC.NET Monitor for Vista Sidebar, which hits version number 0.9.5. This new version is very close to what I've planned for the final 1.0: a lightweight replacement of CCTray that runs on the Vista Sidebar. The main feature introduced with this version is the autoscrolling of the projects when in docked mode: if you enable this new feature, the list of all the projects you are monitoring will automatically scroll and loop through all the projects. I also added some improvements in the usability and error reporting: Don't prompt users for project already...

UPDATE: the latest version of the CC.NET Monitor Gadget for Vista Sidebar is v0.9.5: read more about it in 0.9.5 release notes. Since many people asked for it, I just released a new version of the CruiseControl.NET Monitoring Gadget for Vista Sidebar adding the most requested feature: the Force Build button. Now, in the undocked view, you can see a nice orange button on the right. Push that button to force a build for the project and the button will turn gray, meaning that the project is checking for updated or is already building. This the list of changes: ...

UPDATE: The latest version of CC.NET Monitor for Vista Sidebar is v0.9.5: read more about it on the CC.NET Monitor for Vista Sidebar v0.9.5 release notes. A few days ago I announced the beta phase for version 0.8 of my CC.NET Monitoring gadget, and now I think it's ready for the release. Project opensourced on Google Code I also created to host the project on Google Code, so now I've a central repository to store the source code, the files released, the documentation and also a small issue tracking system. I already added 2 pages on the project wiki: CC.NET Monitor Features ...

UPDATE: version 0.8 released: read more on CruiseControl.NET Monitoring Gadget for Vista Sidebar 0.8 Two weeks ago I released the first version of my CC.NET Monitor Gadget for Vista Sidebar, and I received a lot of feedbacks on what I should put into the next version of the gadget: the possibility to choose which projects to display, an automatic scrolling of the list of projects, a button to force the build on the server, a global indicator to be able to see at a glance if any of the projects are failing. So during the last weeks I worked on these feature...

UPDATE: the latest version of that gadget is now 0.9.5. Read more on the 0.9.5 release notes. I just released the new version of my CC.NET Monitor for Vista Sidebar (why is everybody giving such long names to software?): version number 0.7 This version adds the most requested feature: the ability to specify which project to display. Now in the settings page you can specify the "Display Mode": All projects Only failing projects Only specified projects All but the specified projects and then there is a text...

I just went through the process of submitting my CC.NET Monitor for Vista Sidebar to the Windows Live Gallery. Here is the link to the CC.NET Monitor page. Technorati tags: microsoft live, ccnet monitor, gadget, vista, sidebar

The CruiseControl.NET Monitor for Vista Sidebar is the first "real" Vista Sidebar gadget I developed, so I want to share 2 of the problems I encountered during the development. The first problem was that the XmlHttpRequest always returned "undefined" (which is the null in javascript) for its responseXML property. I was reading an xml file, why did I receive a null instead of the XML Document contained into the response? The XmlStatusReport.aspx file that contains the report for the build server doesn't have an xml content-type (not text/xml, application/xml or with a .xml extension) but has, as any other html page, a text/html content-type....

UPDATE: The latest version of CC.NET Monitor for Vista Sidebar is v0.9.5: read more about it on the CC.NET Monitor for Vista Sidebar v0.9.5 release notes. Yesterday I released the first version (number 0.5) of my CC.NET Monitor for Vista Sidebar. But I forgot some debugging stuff in the release. So, in order to avoid confusion, I bumped up the version number to 0.6. Here is the new version: CC.NET Monitor for Vista Sidebar 0.6 Release notes: Removed an hard-coded url I used for debugging Removed the double cycle I used to test the scrolling of the gadget with more project Thank you to Thomas and Steve for reporting...