I do a lot of these challenges, so I wanted to be able to keep track of their progress on my sidebar. The gadget shows you the time left in the challenge, the current standings, and the “live score”, which is the gamerscore each player has earned that day that hasn’t been counted in the official standings yet (gamerscore is sampled by 360Voice.com at midnight PST each day). Once the challenge is over, the winner is given a little crown and the gadget waits for the next challenge.

Fortunately, the 360Voice.com developers had the good sense to provide an XML web services API to their challenge data (and a lot of other stuff too!) so it’s not too hard to make cool things like this gadget that tie into their site. For this project I went ahead and included my favorite JavaScript library, jQuery, and a neat jQuery-based databinding library called chain.js. Using these made development a lot smoother – the old familiar Sidebar bugs and Internet Explorer weirdness was still there, but overall it wasn’t too bad. I’ve specifically designed it to be as light as possible on 360Voice.com’s API too, so hopefully it won’t impact their service.

I think this is the most attractive gadget I’ve made – it’s certainly the most data-rich. I’m really proud of how it came out. I hope everybody enjoys it, and if you haven’t ever done a 360Voice challenge, go start one! Also, if you like it, please rate it at Windows Live Gallery.

P.S.: While I was monkeying around with gadgets, I’ve made some minor changes to my Top Process gadget – the text-fade option is no longer there since it really didn’t add anything, and I may have fixed a couple minor bugs.

When it’s floating, you can choose either form of the Bungie Card. It’s a little weirder when it’s docked to the sidebar. First, it scales down to fit the sidebar. Then, to see the wide version, you just click on the gadget and the wide card shows up in a flyout. It’s a nice way to keep track of things without taking up too much space. As a bonus, double-clicking on either form will take you to your Halo 3 stats page.

Like the other gadgets I’ve done, this was much more difficult to develop than it should have been. The hardest part was getting the scaled-down card for when the sidebar is docked. At first I just zoomed out the page, like I had done for my Xbox Live Gamercard gadget, but it looked absolutely awful. With the exception of newer browsers like Firefox 3 and Safari, “resizing” an image by just changing the HTML element’s dimensions has always used nearest-neighbor filtering, resulting in a truly horrid image. My first instinct was to try and use the MS-proprietary “filter” CSS property to apply a Matrix DXImageTransform that would do the scaling, since that transform has an argument that’ll get it to use bilinear filtering, which is at least decent. However, Sidebar seems to think that that is a dangerous “active content” operation and blocks it. I tweaked it around for a while before stumbling on a workaround – the BasicImage filter was not blocked, and if I applied any transform at all, the basic zoom scaling would filter the image in a more pleasant way. So right now I’m using an opacity filter set to make the image completely opaque. It’s silly, but it works, and I guess this is what I should expect at this point. Trust me, you wouldn’t have liked it before – the image on the left is the way it looks now, the image on the right is with the original smoothing method:

I actually have another Xbox-related Sidebar gadget in development which is more complex but of limited interest. I hope everyone enjoys the Bungie Card gadget – feel free to send me feedback directly, and please rate the gadget at Windows Live Gallery.

The first step is to actually install IIS7. Unlike in Windows XP, IIS isn’t installed by default. That’s great, but it can be kind of hard to find it when I need it.

You’ve got to click this link that says “Turn Windows features on or off” which will (after some time) bring up a big tree of features you can check or uncheck.

You’re going to want most of “World Wide Web Services”. If you are also interested in installing PHP, make sure everything I’ve circled in red is checked. I just added everything to be safe. What’s important is that you have the ISAPI and CGI stuff. I also checked the IIS6 compatibility bit so that installers for things like PHP might have a better chance at automatically configuring things (fat chance).

At this point you can start dropping things into C:\inetpub\wwwroot and everything should be peachy. I don’t put my sites there since I have them checked out into various folders in my Documents folder. So I need to create some virtual directories to point to my sites. This probably won’t work off the bat – you’ll get 403 errors that complain about wrong permissions or something. You need to make sure that the “IIS_IUSRS” and “Authenticated Users” users have read access to the directory. I’m not sure why “Authenticated Users” needs to be there but it made it work. Make it look like this:

At this point your folder should be accessible from the virtual directory, and any ASP.NET stuff will probably work. If you’re not interested in installing PHP, you can stop here.

Installing PHP on IIS7

PHP doesn’t really play well with IIS. However, we can get it going good enough for local testing of your PHP code. First, go install PHP5 from php.net. Choose to install it as an ISAPI extension for IIS, but don’t worry too much, since it won’t work anyway. Now open up IIS Manager. If you’ve followed the steps above (specifically, selecting the correct “Windows features”), your IIS manager should look something like this:

What’s important is that you have the parts outlined in red – the “CGI” icon, the “ISAPI Filters” icon, and the “ISAPI and CGI Restrictions” icon. Those mean the right bits are installed.

Now double-click the “Handler Mappings” icon, and click “Add Script Map…” Fill out the form like this:

Make sure it’s pointing to your real copy of php5isapi.dll. At this point your Handler Mappings screen should look like this:

Also make sure that your “ISAPI Filters” screen looks like this:

If not, add PHP like this:

If you’re running the 64-bit version of Vista like I am, there’s one last thing to do in IIS Manager. Since the PHP ISAPI extension is a 32-bit app, you’ll need to set your app pool to run in 32-bit mode. I’ve already written one blog post on this (to get MySQL working with ASP.NET), and the instructions are the same. Basically open up the app pool’s advanced settings dialog and flip it to 32-bit mode:

If you forget this you’re likely to get errors that look like “Calling LoadLibraryEx on ISAPI filter “C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\php5isapi.dll” failed”.

If you load up your PHP files you’ll probably get something like “failed opening required” blah blah. This is because the PHPRC environment variable isn’t set correctly by the PHP installer. We’ll have to do it ourselves. Go to the Control Panel and search for “env”:

Now add a System environment variable like this (point it at the directory PHP is installed):

At this point you must reboot your computer to get the environment variable to take effect. Annoying but true. At this point PHP should work, more or less.

I still have some problems with PHP the way I’ve described configuring it. The most obvious is that the IIS worker crashes every once in a while:

I suspect reconfiguring PHP to be run as a CGI handler instead of an ISAPI module would help here, but it hasn’t been annoying enough to make me go change it. Another avenue to investigate is the new FastCGI support that’s available for IIS7.

The other problem I’ve had is that I have a handful of image files in one of my sites that are managed by Subversion and get locked and unlocked pretty frequently. After I’ve committed an image, it loses its permissions and can’t be served from IIS anymore, and I need to go reset the permissions. That’s pretty annoying, and I’m not sure if it’s a bug in Subversion or in one of my SVN clients (TortoiseSVN and Subclipse).

At least this setup works enough to try things out quickly. I hope it helps anyone else who’s struggling with one of these setups.

Update: You might want to try out the new Microsoft Web Platform Installer which purports to set up PHP along with anything else you might need.

In CPU mode it displays percentages, and in RAM mode it displays absolute memory footprint values. Remember that some apps (like .NET or Java apps) look like they’re taking a lot of memory, but will give it back when you get low on RAM, so it’s not a worry if they gobble up some extra RAM when you’ve got it. Of course, for most native apps (like Firefox or Photoshop), the value displayed in TopProcess represents a less flexible chunk of resources.

A couple of bugs and less-than-desirable behaviors have been fixed, too. Whenever you change settings the changes will be reflected in the gadget immediately, and turning text fade off and then on again won’t cause text to overlap in a big mess. Also, some of the comments on the Windows Live Gallery page for TopProcess suggest that people have been seeing performance problems with the gadget. I haven’t actually seen any problems myself, but I went through the code and tightened it up a bit here and there – hopefully it’ll work better for those people.

So pick up the new version, rate it on Windows Live Gallery, and enjoy the new functionality.

PS: I was holding this back until my friend could come through with the Russian and Japanese translations, but he’s just too busy and I had to fall back to Google Translate. I apologize if the translations are awful. If you would like to help fix them, or to translate TopProcess into your favorite language, please contact me.

The second change is that Top Process has been translated into 3 more languages. This is the first software I’ve ever written that has been localized, and I’m super excited, even though there wasn’t that much to translate. User Stefano Pirovano contributed an Italian translation, and my multilingual college buddy Mitch provided Japanese and Russian translations. If anyone else wants to take a crack at it, just email me. Hopefully some of my .NET stuff can be ready for localization at some point too.