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“WPF/E” and Sidebar gadgets

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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

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 15, 2007
    wow, those are quite large limitations. Can't we give it an absolute path by getting the gadget's directory and appending the image name? Would that not solve the problem? Or how about copying the values to a temporary folder we have write access to (like Temporary Internet Files), and using that? So, if WPF gadgets are coming in a later revision of the Sidebar (as has been mentioned, I think by Microsoft, but I'm not sure), what are you going to use if not WPF/E? Perhaps license Stanimir Stoyanoff's WPF extension? (http://www.stoyanoff.info/blog/code/styler/) Karl

  • Anonymous
    January 17, 2007
    I just hope Microsoft makes the sidebar a powerful platform with full programmability and a tool similar to Dashcode to write gadgets without programming. The Dashboard may also become a reason to "switch".

  • Anonymous
    February 03, 2007
    Can't you fix this by manually downloading the stuff with JScript/XMLHttp or JScript/IE:DOWNLOAD? Gorm

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2007
    very annoying. I wanted to include a MediaElement that referenced a remote wmv source into a gadget. rather stuck now!