I've made some minor updates to my Windows Sidebar Gadgets - the 360Voice.com Challenge gadget works again after 360Voice moved their API endpoints, TopProcess has gained a French translation and clearer text when used on systems with IE9 installed...

I've finally gotten around to doing some maintenance updates on three of my most-used bits of software (JSONView, XBList, and TopProcess), all in the last couple weeks. Now that they're all approved and live, I thought I'd summarize what's changed...

In my post introducing the Bungie Card Windows Sidebar Gadget I mentioned that I was making one more gadget that would be of somewhat more limited interest. Well, I'm finally finished with it: the 360Voice.com Challenges gadget! 360Voice.com is a fun...

I suppose I'm a glutton for punishment. After writing my last two Windows Sidebar gadgets, I really meant to swear them off entirely. They're really a pain to develop. But when my favorite video game developer, Bungie (recently of Halo fame) launched...

I didn't think I had anything more to do with my TopProcess Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget after its minor update a couple months ago. However, I got a suggestion emailed to me from a TopProcess user that was easy to implement and adds a lot to the gadget...

Just a quick update on the Top Process Windows Sidebar Gadget I made a couple months ago. First, I've added an option to disable the crossfade effect whenever the list of processes is updated. When this setting is checked, there's no more smooth fade...

I guess I didn't learn my lesson with the TopProcess Sidebar gadget, because today when I got home from work I was itching to make another. This time I figured I could stick to something much simpler. I had looked around for a Sidebar Gadget that would...

Last weekend I decided that I would try my hand at developing a Windows Sidebar Gadget. I've got a few ideas about gadgets that I'd like to make, so I thought I'd whip up a quick, useful gadget to get familiar with the platform. I ended up making the TopProcess gadget. It's basically a version of the standard UNIX top command. It'll show the top X processes on your computer, which are the processes taking the most CPU. It just sits there in the sidebar updating that list every few seconds, letting you know what's chewing up your dual cores.

You can grab it from me on my new Sidebar Gadgets page, or from Windows Live Gallery. If you like it, please rate it or review it on Windows Live Gallery, so more people get to see it.

That's a heck of a title, but it's a problem I hit recently. I have a bunch of ASP.NET sites that use MySQL as their datastore, but I hadn't tried the on IIS7 yet. It took a while to get them to work at all (I had to set permissions on web.config and...