Windows Gadget To Display VWorker Recent Open Projects

by Naveen 26. January 2012 21:18

Download Gadget For Vworker Recent Projects (22.07 kb)

In this post I will discuss how to write a Windows 7 gadget. It has been long since I wrote a gadget. This week I was looking at putting some scroll view of freelance projects from vWorker web site. They have a piece of HTML code that you can put on your web site to show latest open projects in a scrolling view. When I am working on some project or executing some other tasks on my desktop, then I do not any web site open. I want to have a view of latest open projects on side of my big desktop view. So, developing a gadget made more sense to me. So in this past I will share that gadget with all of you who use VWorker for doing freelance work. And I will show steps to write this windows gadget as well.

Develop Windows Gadget

If you are considering Windows gadget development, then I will strongly encourage to read Microsoft documentation on gadget framework. It will give some good basic background on gadget development. Here are steps that you will need to follow to write a simple Windows gadget like I wrote for displaying latest open freelance projects on VWorker site.

Create a folder with name same as what you would your gadget to be named. For example I create a folder named VWorkeLatestProjects.gadgets
Create a 64x64 image (recommended size by Microsoft) that you would like to use a logo for your gadget. This is the logo that will show up in Windows control panel UI when you look at available gadgets on your machine.

Create a XML file named Gadget.xml in this folder. This file will contain manifest of your gadgets. In simple terms, this file contains all details about your gadget. This file does not contain implementation of gadget itself. Following is how my file looks like.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<gadget>
  <name>VWorker Recent Projects</name>
  <namespace>microsoft.windows</namespace>
  <version>1.0.0.0</version>
  <author name="ByteBlocks.com">
    <info url="http://www.byteblocks.com" text="Byteblocks.com"/>
    <logo src="logo.png"/>
  </author>
  <copyright>
    © 2012</copyright>
  <description>See latest open projects at vWorker.</description>
  <icons>
    <icon width="64" height="64" src="icon.png"/>
  </icons>
  <hosts>
    <host name="sidebar">
      <autoscaleDPI><!--_locComment_text="{Locked}"-->true</autoscaleDPI>
      <base type="HTML" apiVersion="1.0.0" src="VWorkerLatestProjects.html"/>
      <permissions><!--_locComment_text="{Locked}"-->Full</permissions>
      <platform minPlatformVersion="1.0"/>
      <defaultImage src="drag.png"/>
    </host>
  </hosts>
</gadget>

As you can see from this file content, it lays out blue print of the gadget.

Now comes the implementation of the gadget. There is an entry with tag name BASE that defines the entry point for implementation. You will notice that I have set it to VWorkerLatestProject.html. What this means is that when gadget loads it will load up this HTML file. So, add an HTML file in your folder that is going to be entry point. Following is snapshot of contents of my HTML file.

<html dir="ltr">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
    <link href="css/vworkerlatestprojects.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    <title>VWorker Latest Projects</title>
  </head>
  <body id="VWorkerProjectFeedGadget">
  <g:background id="VWorkerFeedBG">
  <div id="feedbody">
  <iframe id="VWorkerFeedIFrame" frameborder="1" scrolling="no" width="150" height = "300"
        src = "http://www.vWorker.com/RentACoder/misc/LinkToUs/ScrollingBidRequests.asp?
        txtWidth=150&txtHeight=300&blnHideChannelSubscribe=true&
        blnLaunchLinkInNewWindow=true&blnFullTitle=true&txtBgColor=white">
		Your browser does not support inline frames...However, you can click 
		<a href="http://www.vWorker.com/RentACoder/misc/LinkToUs/ScrollingBidRequests.asp?
         blnHideChannelSubscribe=true&blnLaunchLinkInNewWindow=true&blnFullTitle=true">
		here</a> to see the related document.
		</iframe>
  </div>
  </g:background>
  </body>
</html>

As you can see, implementation is just like developing a regular HTML page. For my gadget it was as simple as putting IFrame content for VWorker site into my HTML page. So you can see how I included that IFRAME tag inside g:background tag of this gadget.

Yes, that was the whole implementation of this gadget. It is ready to be deployed and used.

Deploying Windows Gadget

Deployment of windows gadget is very simple. You just need to copy your gadget folder at either of following two locations depending on scope and visibility of this gadget.

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets (for user gadgets)
%SYSTEM_ROOT%\Program Files\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets (for global gadgets)

For example in my case, I want every user of may desktop to be able to see this gadget. So I copied it at following location.

C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\VWorkerLatestProjects.gadget

Adding Windows Gadget To Desktop

Once you have deployed the gadget, you can follow these steps to put the gadget on your desktop

On your desktop go to Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization. Or right click on your desktop screen.
There you will see option for Gadgets. Click on it and it will bring up dialog box with Gadgets installed on your machine. You will find your own gadget there was well.
Double click on the gadget icon you would like to install. It will appear docked to right side of your desktop screen.

Windows Gadget For VWorker Latest Projects

I have attached this gadget with this post. Download the zip file, unzip it in one of the two locations that I earlier specified and you will be good to go.

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Tags: Windows7, Gadgets

Windows | Windows 7

How to get emails from all exchange mail folders on iPhone

by Naveen 23. January 2012 23:42

Recently I replaced my Blackberry with iPhone 4s at work. It was such a relief. Using Blackberry was a total nightmare because of various reasons. Everybody had different reasons to not like it. Here are some that always pushed me away from Blackberry.

Very low battery life
Usability

Anyhow this post is not about Blackberry. This post is about setting up Microsoft Exchange email folders on your iPhone 4s. After I received my iPhone from our IT guys, I noticed that I was only getting emails in my Inbox folder. I have set up a lot of email rules to move emails to various folders when they arrive. I remember that on Blackberry I had to make some modifications in sync application so that I could receive emails on selected folders along with Inbox. So following intuition, I went to Settings in iPhone and found the way to do it. Here are the steps that you can follow to push emails from all or selected folders in Microsoft Exchange to folders on iPhone.

Select Settings from main screen of your iPhone
Scroll down a little in Settings screen and you will find Mail, Contacts, Calendars option. Click on this item in the list.
On Mail, Contacts, Calendars screen look under Accounts section for the exchange account for which you want to make the changes. And click on that account item in the list.
On this exchange set up screen, at the bottom you will find Mail Folders to Push item. Click on this item in the list.
On this Mail Folders to Push screen, you will complete list of email folders available for you. Just select the folders that you would like to include.

Now you will be all set to receive emails from your selected folders on your iPhone.

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Tags: iPhone

Apple

Skype Crashes On Windows 7

by Naveen 10. January 2012 07:32

I am a very heavy user of Skype. All my communication with my team members and clients happens through. Yesterday when i logged into Skype, within 5 seconds the application crashed. My first impression was that I probably forgot to restart my machine after installing Windows updates. So I restarted my laptop, same deal. The application crashed right after I logged in. This happened few times. So l looked at the event logs and found the following details.

Faulting application name: Skype.exe, version: 5.5.59.124, time stamp: 0x4e96c098
Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 6.1.7601.17651, time stamp: 0x4e211319
Exception code: 0x0eedfade
Fault offset: 0x0000b9bc
Faulting process id: 0x1310
Faulting application start time: 0x01cccedd641f3439
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Skype\Phone\Skype.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\syswow64\KERNELBASE.dll
Report Id: b189e264-3ad0-11e1-b713-415645000030

That is not a very good sign that the application is crashing inside a system DLL Kernelbase.dll. This was obvious sign of some corruption in installation or something changed in OS that is causing the errors. So I decided to re-install Skype client. After cleaning up old install and re-install, the problem did not go away. Skype kept crashing right after login. Then I went onto Skype's support site and forums and found out that there is some known issue in Version 5.5 client. Some of the advertisers are pushing in some code that is causing this unstable behavior in Skype itself. Skype is asking people to download Beta version 5.7 of Skype to try. After i installed version 5.7 (Beta), the problem disappeared and no more crashes. I have provided link to Skype's page from where you can download the beta client.

Click here to download Skype Beta version

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Tags: Skype

General

Set file download folder for Chrome

by Naveen 9. January 2012 05:56

One of most performed action in Internet browsing is that we all download lot of music, videos, document etc. to our local hard disk for later viewing. A lot of time we view those files immediately and some time we want to do it later. If you want to view it later then you will need to know where exactly that file is stored. By default Google Chrome stores file at the following location.

C:\Users\{user name}\Downloads

This is location for Windows 7 and assuming C drive is your system drive. A lot of time I have run into situations where I have downloaded same files multiple times. Chrome and other browsers do a good job of renaming a file if it is going to duplicate copy of an existing one. Then you know that you really did not need this file because you already have it. But when you use multiple browsers then lot of time you have duplicate files at multiple locations. If you designate a folder on your machine where you want to keep downloaded files, then you can easily manage those files.

In Chrome you can change the default location of downloaded files as described below.

Click on little wrench looking icon on upper right side of the browser bar and click on Options menu item.
Now you will presented with Options screen in a new tab. Click on on Under the Hood option in left navigation bar.
In Options - Under the Hood screen, in right view there is a section for Downloads as shown below. In this section you can change the default location. You will notice a check box that allows you to set the option so that browser will always ask for location where file should be saved.