14 DAY TRIAL // One of the top three Windows Sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista links rival company Google directly to Microsoft. The Redmond Company has only just announced the completion of the Windows Vista Gadgets Competition on Code Project that debuted back in February 2007. Two months later, Microsoft has proudly announced the top three Windows Sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista.
"Last month we posted an update to the Windows Vista Gadgets Competition on Code Project. Now that the competition is complete, the team behind it would like to thank everyone who entered. The goal of the contest was to deliver 20 quality Sidebar Gadgets; we surpassed our goal considerably with a total of 29 gadget entries. The source code for the top 10 gadgets was downloaded by about 159,000 developers," revealed Nick White, Microsoft Program Manager.
Out of the 29 gadget entries, three have managed to stand out of the crowd. They are Soapbox Video Gadget, .NET Interop for Gadgets - A C# GMail Inbox Reader Example and A Virtual Earth slide show Gadget for Windows Vista.
Soapbox Video Gadget will deliver video content straight from Microsoft's YouTube rival to your Windows Sidebar and desktop. Although, at this point in time, Microsoft has closed down Soapbox, making it an invitation only service, you will not have any issues in accessing and watching a variety of top notch content via the Soapbox Video Gadget. The application will centralize a variety of videos according to several ratings such as Top Rated, To Favorites and so on and so forth.
The .NET Interop for Gadgets - A C# GMail Inbox Reader Example is a project that aimed to demonstrate that an interop layer between gadgets and .NET could be created in order to enable Vista users to run any .NET code via their Windows Sidebar gadget. This particular C# project involves reading the GMail inbox from the Windows Sidebar.
The Virtual Earth slide show Gadget for Windows Vista is exactly what it says, a gadget designed to integrate Virtual earth content into the operating system.