“WPF/E” and Sidebar gadgets

One of my favorite new web technologies is now available for preview. I’d urge to you go check out the developer center and team blog.

Of course, since “WPF/E” is a technology designed to work in web pages, many of you are going to try it out inside gadgets. Very cool. Unfortunately, you’ll probably hit some roadblocks when attempting to render “WPF/E” content inside a Sidebar gadget.

External Files

Samples that access external files will not be able to access those files. This includes images referenced in the XAML and XAML files, even inside the gadget package.

This is not a security issue, but rather a problem with the way the “WPF/E” control resolves file paths and URLs. Unfortunately, there is no known workaround, such as placing the files on a remote server. Only XAML content embedded in the HTML files will load.

Making samples into gadgets

It is minor in comparison to the above issue, but most examples won’t have height and width set on the body. This is required for Sidebar gadgets, so be sure to add it.

Brian