Question

I’m trying to embed Windows-Sidebar-Widgets into my own .Net Application (WPF and C#), but I dont’t realy know where to start. I googled a bit but only found SDK and tutorials for widget-development. I found that there is a small service in Windows, running the widgets. My thought was that I could perhaps fake this service and provide his functions whithin my programm, so that I can run and show the widgets.

Does anyone have some tips on how to do this? Or some experience in doing so? Perhaps there is even some kind of libary for that kind of stuff?

If this is not possible it is also an option to switch to an OpenSource widged-manager to use this widgeds, but this is only an emergency solution and the windows-gadgeds would be very appreciated.

Some information about my system:

I’ve written some kind of small windowmanager for childwindows in my application. And on the top of this I want to show the widgets in some kind of HostWindow.

Any hint will be appreciated.

P.S.: I would be willing to share the results if I (or we) get this working 🙂

Answer 1

I’ve never seen a library for hosting gadgets, but since they are basically just websites you could use the MSHTML component to host any arbitrary gadget in theory.

This isn’t to say it will be easy.

You’ll need to extract a gadget to some temporary directory, spin up something hosting MSHTML (in WinForms WebBrowser would be convenient), navigate to the appropriate file in that temp directory (discovered by parsing gadget.xml), and shove something resembling the System object into the gadget.

As a starting point, inject some script that sets System = window.external; onload and WebBrowerser.ObjectForScripting = new FakeGadgetSystem().

FakeGadgetSystem will need [ComVisible(true)] and to implement a decent amount of stuff. I’d advise grabbing a widget or two to test with that mildly exercise the Gadget API, and then slowly implement the calls they make. It’ll be a long haul for 100% compatibility with the official gadget hosting service.