My first Vista Sidebar gadget

A while ago I did build a Konfabulator Widget (now Yahoo Gadgets) for World of Warcraft (Slaine's WoW Realm Status Widget). This widget went off to the Blizzard - Realm Status pages and returned the status of your favourite server.

With playing around with Vista of the last couple of weeks I've been looking at the Sidebar Widgets that are now part of the Vista desktop and have been hard at work converting my widget into a Gadget :).

Now Microsoft use the term Gadget as a over term to discribe Live Gadgets (That are basically web-parts for Windows Live) and Side-bar Gadgets which are for the Vista desktop.

I havn't quite got my head around the physical differenced between the two as the documentation at the moment is a little lacking on MSDN and the Windows Gadget site.

However what I have determined is that you can write the gadgets either in HTML / Javascript or as a Componant using Visual Stuido.

As the Konfabulator widget was a mixture of XML and Javascript, I've built the Vista widget using the HTML / Javascript way.

What the Gadget is doing is once it loads up it does a AJAX call to the one of the Blizzard Realm Status pages depending on which Region you've selected in the settings page, Either US or Europe (En, Fr or De). The response is read back in a AJAX callback function and a regular expression is used to select the correct Realm and pull out the status, the server type and the current population size.

If you move the move over the icon the Realm information bars fade in and then fades out when you move the mouse away.

I've got a little bit more work to do on it before I release it, as you miht see that there is a purple borader around the widget. This is to do with having transparancy on top of another transparant image. I'll have to re-design how I build the graphics up. If anyone want to do a spot of testing for me then drop me a line.