Sidebar Gadgets - getting started made easy
We've got some great New Zealand gadgets up on the Microsoft NZ website now including ones from DigiRama, TrafficWatch, NZ Herald, ASB, and TVNZ (my personal favorite). These are all listed on here.
If you've been thinking about writing a side bar gadget (and you are not the only one) there are a few places you might like to start.
The first place to start is the Gadget Development overview which gives you an introduction to building a sidebar gadget. This will give you an understanding of the basic architecture and minimum requirements for a gadget.
There is also the Sidebar Reference (ignore the mostly blank landing page - look in the table of contents...) that will provide details about events and API calls available to use from inside the sidebar.
Daniel from the UK DPE team has also put together a 10 minute video that walks you through developing a gadget, this is a good way to get an overview of the process and simple gadget development.
In case you are a little daunted about burying your head in javascript and HTML or if you just dont have the time to do all this reading, JB has got something that should help. He's published a gadget shim which is essentially the basics of a gadget already to go. All you've got to do is download it, add your content and publish the gadget.
Go and download the shim (a small zip file) and build a gadget. And when you do, make sure you add it to the gallery - and let me know so we can add it to the NZ gadget page.