Silverlight Sidebar Gadget (VB)

Template to easily get started on developing a Sideber Gadget using Silverlight 3.0 or 4.0 controls in Visual Basic.NET.

When you build the gadget's solution, you are automatically prompted to install or update the gadget. In order to update the gadget it must be closed.

Since there is no 64 bit Silverlight runtime yet, on 64 bit versions of Windows the gadgets will only work if you start the 32 bit version of sidebar.exe, (path for it is %programfiles(x86)%\Windows Sidebar\sidebar.exe)

Debugging the gadget can be done by attaching the Visual Studio debugger to the sidebar.exe process, or by starting the SilverlightGadgetDebugger project provided in the template (F5).

Changes

In version 1.6 you no longer have to manually attach the Visual Studio debugger to the Sidebar process in order to debug. You just have to debug the SilverlightGadgetDebugger project created by the template. This will automatically attach the Visual Studio debugger to the Sidebar process. Also in this version a bug was fixed about calling SilverlightGadget.Flyout(false) (it used to have the same effect as calling with the input parameter set to true).

In version 1.7 the debugging experience has been fully automated. Starting the SilverlightGadgetDebugger project created by the template start a "sandbox" version of the Sidebar that already contains the gadget being developed. When the run/debugging session ends, the original configuration for the Sidebar is restored. A bug in detecting installed Sivlerlight versions on 32 bit Windows XP has been fixed.

In version 1.8 the possibility of debugging 64 bit gadgets was added. This can be achieved by setting the Target Platform to x64 for the SilverlightGadgetDebugger project.

Version 1.9 only adds support for Visual Studio 2012.