windowsvista – Page 2 – Nick Hodge's Blog

Gadget Geek Journey; Desintation 2: Vista Sidebar Gadget

What an interesting day with Windows Vista. It is certainly “polished” than Windows 2000 and XP; things seems to be placed in logical areas. Also took the opportunity to install Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta, which worked flawlessly – all running successfully in Parallels! Two computers in one is a major time saver.

It was also time to swap to Microsoft Expression Web, to complete the Microsoft-centric development environment. Expression Web certainly feels more polished than Visual Web 2005. I hope to spend more time in this app.
Closing the loop on my Thursday experimentation with live.com and Vista Sidebar gadgets: and the result is a new little gadget I am alpha testing: The Neil Finn Lyric Vista gadget.

And it looks sorta like:

Please right-click, save-as a “.gadget”, double-click and drag and enjoy the words of one of the world’s best lyricists. Comments and feature requests more than welcome.

Best starting place for the proverbial Hello World experience for Vista Sidebar gadgets is http://microsoftgadgets.com/Sidebar/DevelopmentOverview.aspx

Daniel Moth, from Microsoft UK has an Excellent screencast on the Channel 9 site at http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=255735.These gets you going on the first part: at least getting your gadget running and drag and droppable.

You will need to do a little more Javascript, as this triggers events that ensure your sidebar gadget works

http://blogs.msdn.com/sidebar/ has some more up-to date info, as the MSDN site is a little behind on updating. I wonder if Microsoft is going to release an Apple Dashcode style of mini development application for widgets? Hope so. Whilst the development process is no more difficult than simple web page design; there are many pieces of wiring that could be made easier with a simple builder.

Gadget Geek Journey; Desintation 1: live.com

Time to get serious on my resolutions. Well, at least one anyway; I’ll start the waist shrinking/walking later. It’s Thursday Geekout time!

Inspired by Robert Scoble’s Podtech.net live.com gadget posting, and a general feeling that gadgets are where it is at for non-professional programmers like myself.

So, first port-of-call http://gallery.live.com/ then on to the Developer center

Decision time: what to gadget up? A Cricket gadget is underway. I am sure that one of the various national religions of football will follow come March. For weather I can use my real window to look outside. (note: growing up on a farm, you learn to read the weather by looking through the window at the clouds). Neil Finn Lyrics!

So, there is some magic back-end code that is pulling the data from a small database, and rendering text smartly onto a random Neil Finn image. This will be the first step. No need to confuse myself with too much shenanigans just yet.

Off to the Developer’s Guide, and download the examples from the .zip. Oooh, css xml javascript. Easy. I have a localhost web server running, so that’s no stress. Text editor open, coding music in the ears.

How to test out the gadget? OK, I need Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005. Now is a good time as any to test it out. There is a method of harnessing your local gadget to Internet Explorer and the live.com servers to test out before embarrassing yourself publicly! Hmm, seems like you can directly access the test harness with the correctly formed URL. There are three versions of this URL that I can find.

OK, it seems that the live.com gadget testing Javascript harnesses, Internet Explorer 7 and cross-site scripting are in the midst of a conspiracy to stop testing. Time to hit the production servers with the code.

This posting on the new Gadgets forums helps: just go straight into live.com, cross your fingers!

Works first time! After an hour of cleaning up and renaming things as per the recommendations, here it is:

Click: live.com Neil Finn Lyric Gadget

Further comment live.com gadgets are simple to create. XML file manifest, or list of what’s important; a CSS file to style your content and the Javascript. This Javascript contains the logic of your gadget which is essentially inserting HTML into the stream. It can gather text externally to generate this HTML into something more interesting than a picture.

foreach { blogpost in blogpoststhisweek } closeloop;

Panasonic does a deal with Connexion, specifically so you can GSM/GPRS whilst Qantas flights.

Peter Jackson to direct “The Hobbit” movie? Oh the horror!

Parallels for Mac is now at build 1910. For those who want to keep their feet in both worlds, you can run Windows XP and Vista at the same time.

Vista RC1++ (alias build 5728), the “show and shine” / “spit and polish” or most correctly, the Rule#12 “Fit and Finish” releases have started.

Microsoft Office 2007 Beta (and the followup Beta 2 Technical Release) is now available for Australians to download. Australia was missing for the first month or so.

I may have killed SVG off too soon, or at least taken an “Adobe-centric” view; and AndrewS comments that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Flash is bogus. Reading some of the posts from the FlashForward Conference, the current, modern mechanism is to use SWFObject.

Vista RC1 OK on Parallels 1896.2 (and Acrobat 8)

Watching the Parallels web site, I noted that the engineers had posted some more info, and a later build. 1896.2 I don’t know what the .2 means; probably that .1 wasn’t quite right.

Waiting for a better video driver (to use up the 256Mb of the MacBook Pro, without resorting to Boot Camp)

Anyway:

Is Vista RC1 build 5600 installed and launched OK. Office 2003 installed perfectly on RC1; now I am hunting down an installer for Office 2007. Dontcha just love software?

Beta Technical Refresh 2 on Beta 2 on Release Candidate 1 on build 2 of Release Candidate 2 on MacOS 10.4.7. Schwarzwaelder Kirschtorte.

Speaking of cakes, Acrobat 8.0 is announced. I don’t have Acrobat 8 in any form, so I cannot add the cherries.

Parallels 1884 Vista Quick Notes (and update)

Download the 21Mb update to Parallels (to build 1884)

Boot Windows XP to ensure all is OK before I install Vista. Windows XP “seems” to boot a little faster. Unable to quantify exactly how much.

Backup existing 15Gb Windows XP .hdd, just in case. Create a new 15Gb image to install Vista into.

Pararllels settings:

Install into the fresh 15Gb image, 1024Mb of RAM allocated to image. Vista is marked at (experimental) as OS. Installing onto a MacBook Pro with 2Gb of RAM and MacOS X 10.4.7

Beta 2 Build 5384 DVD (thanks, Frank Arrigo at Microsoft Australia)
Started install at 11:05am
Vista install auto-restarted at 11:35
Vista install auto-restarted at 11:43am
Questions (location, time, username) at 11:46am
Vista install auto-restarted at 11:47am
Into Vista Beta 2 at 11:50am
Install Parallels Tools from the Parallels VM menu. Note that these don’t seem to be signed drivers, so ignore all the warnings and install away
Manual Vista Restart
On restart, if the “Welcome Center” doesn’t appear, choose it from the Start menu. Click on Add Hardware.
Vista found network card, and automatically configured network. Also note that Vista also finds “PCI Bridge Device” which I asked Vista to ignore
Restart; Vista found network card, and automatically configured network. Note that the Network Adaptor settings for the Parallels VM set “Bridged” worked OK

In short, it works. Note that I haven’t stress tested this; and the Parallels guys say its experimental. Beta OS on experimental hypervisor virtualization. Your mileage may actually turn into inchage quickly.

RC1 Note from 8:20pm

You cannot install Vista RC1 on Parallels. Bugger. ISO, DVD burnt or upgrade from Beta 2 to RC1. None of these paths work.

***STOP: 0x000000A5 (0x0001000B, 0x50434146, etc)

“The ACPI Bios in this system is not fully compliant to the specification. Please read the Readme.txt for possible workarounds, or contact your system vendor for an updated bios.”