Dilbert got me Zune

So started my year 2007. My Article on Sidebar Gadget featuring Dilbert (Daily
Dilbert 1.0) got me a bonus prize at Code Project Vista Gadgets
Competition

What did i win ? A Microsoft Zune Player

Here are the link to the Windows Vista Blog and excerpts from the article
!

Introduction

With the broadest ever release of Microsoft Vista World wide, 2007 opens the
door to an era of gadget development. Gadgets are small, light weight but
powerful applications which stay on the Windows Vista Sidebar. The coolest thing
about a gadget is that it is not dependent on any particular language or
technologies, and you don't need to be a rocket scientist to create a gadget.
Basic knowledge of HTML and Javascript is enough for that, but you can also
program in any Microsoft language for windows/web to extend a gadget. Once you
know the basic rules of gadget development, only sky is the limit for
productivity and innovations.

This article describes a simple Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget which delivers
the Daily Dilbert cartoon to your desktop.

There is a RSS Feed available
from feedburner.com
which gives you the contents of the daily dilbert in a form of an xml file. The
idea behind, is to read that file, parse the content and display it beautifully
in your sidebar. The user can view cartoons for last 5 days. The benefit is, for
all those (like me) who want to start there day with the Dilbert strip, don't
have to go to the website or even open the feed, to see it. Just click on the
date in the sidebar gadget and a flyout window will show you the cartoon of the
day.

This article also discusses five common features of Sidebar gadget
development:

1. Create: A simple gadget with minimum files
   
2. Use of Ajax: Read an XML file from a website (RSS feed) Get and parse the
   RSS Feed for the Dilbert cartoon from http://feeds.feedburner.com/tapestrydilbert
   
   
3. Parse XML : Extract the path of the image
   
4. Rich Display: The gadget's look and feel
   
5. FlyOut: A simple implementation of Windows Sidebar Flyout to display the
   image

Check the article here