Beginning my Vista gadget for SharePoint Events

I've finally gotten around to building a Vista gadget. Thanks to some prodding by my colleague Neal Cross I thought I would try and build a simple SharePoint List subscriber. Effectively its just a single RSS feed viewer. The overall idea is to eventually redesign the gadget to look like a calendar or event update tool.

Thanks to Allyson Skene for pointing me at the SharePoint integration with Outlook:

"A few areas where calendaring can help.

1. MOSS calendars allow for a workspace to also be created in addition to the calendar item for minutes, agenda etc – more than just a calendar
   1. Centralised repository & history of team meetings etc

1. Ability for multiple teams to overlay their calendars
   1. For example, the training department wanting to identify days which suit multiple business units, previously would have taken 3 days and many phone calls, with MOSS this process could take a matter of minutes

1. Ability to connect to Outlook 2007"

You  first need to create the Calendar in SharePoint as it is a list type that is created.  Once you create it you then have an option under Actions to Connect to Outlook.  Once this is done you will be able to make the changes through either Outlook or SharePoint.  Each user would need to have access to the SharePoint site to be able to access the Calendar and do the link themselves, this would only need to be done once.

With a little help from a pre-made example of interop for Vista Gadgets and some basic XmlTextReader help I was able to deserialize any RSS feed into a data structure. I picked a random SharePoint site and began testing.

I haven't yet been able to get my modified gadget to start the managed code but I'm working on Debugging the JavaScript within Visual Studio 2008.

Packaging is also something I am working on as for now I have simply copied files to the gadget directory and renamed a folder to project.gadget.