Shawn’s Thoughts

The folks on the team have been bouncing up and down, waiting for Bill to show off one of the projects our team has been working on – yep, it’s the Windows Sidebar…  It’s baaaaack…

It’s been a really freah change of pace, getting to work on some tightly focused, tightly staffed projects again.  The challenge our mgmt team had was to find the most passionate devs they could to work on this project, and they certainly did – the Goat and Ooey have been intimately involved, for instance.  Keep an eye on http://www.microsoftgadgets.com – folks will be blogging about their experience and tips going forward.

Developers will want to focus their attention on our Gadgets platform.  The offical definition – “Gadgets are a new category of mini-application for the Windows Desktop and the Web. Windows Sidebar is the container for Gadgets on the Windows desktop in Windows Vista. Web Gadgets can also be built for rich, dynamic sites like Start.com.“ 

For those of you down at the PDC, David Streams (my boss, so tell him how much you LOVE my writing) will be giving a presentation on Windows Sidebar at 3:45 on Thursday.  David and team have developed great demo content, particularly a visually compelling clock done entirely in Windows Presentation Foundation which will be a focus of his presentation.

For Channel 9 fans, Robert Scoble will be posting a pretty in-depth interview with David and Sean Alexander that gives a fair look at Windows Sidebar. 

Keep watching - there’s more than our team has been working on…