Creating Gadgets in Atlas

I was chatting to Darren Neimke over the weekend very briefly about some Atlas things and he mentioned that he would have a post on gadgets coming up soon. His post will no doubt have more detail than mine, but I thought I'd mention this anyway. I hadn't played much with Gadgets but after talking with Darren, thought I'd give it a shot.

I am constantly amazed at just how functional and easy working with Atlas is, and gadgets are no exception.

Note that the Gadget I am creating here is actually quite useless, but the concept will be the same for all Gadgets.

So first to creating the Gadget, my markup is as follows (after creating a blank Atlas web site from the template):

<atlas:Gadget ID="g1" runat="server" Description="test gadget" Title="My Test Gadget">
  <ContentTemplate>
      <span>this is a test gadget</span><br />
      <input type="button" id="btn" value="my button" />
   </ContentTemplate>
</atlas:Gadget>

As I mentioned, not exactly a wonder-gadget. To verify that the gadget worked I loaded the page in a browser and it displayed fine. Furthemore, I could view the 'manifest' of the gadget by appending '?gadget=true' which shows a page of XML displaying some RSS feed details about the gadget.

And really thats it. I can now add this gadget to a site like live.com and thats exactly what I did. I wont go into those details, you can follow the instructions from the Atlas documentation about it located here (http://atlas.asp.net/docs/Walkthroughs/DevScenarios/gadget.aspx). Simply substitue the RSS feed gadget name with your URL gadget details where appropriate (as the example uses an RSSFeed gadget to demonstrate adding a gadget to live.com).

Now I have my wonder-gadget added to live.com. Easy and simple. Again, kudos to the Atlas (and the live.com) team for this piece of functionality. I like it and will be devoting some time to thinking up funky gadgets to create.