cjsimmons.net

Please note that some info in this post may be out of date. Please use this post for reference purposes and a point in the right direction.

Ever since I first used the Vista back in the early days of when it was still in Beta, I fell in love with the Sidebar that it had. Sure enough it’s not a feature rich as Desktop Sidebar, but I but I still like it.

For the last little while, I’ve been looking for a sidebar project that is able to use the gadgets for the Vista Sidebar, but I was starting to think that this didn’t exist. The closest that I’ve found is a sidebar project from thoosje.com, but it has it’s own library of gadgets, so I was still out of luck. Then I stumbled upon this post over at joejoe.org.

As you can see from this screenshot, I’ve got it working, and it works great. Adding gadgets isn’t the same as in Vista, you have to add them manually, but the how to is in the read me in the download.

If you’d like to try this out, head on over to the post at joejoe.org (linked above), and click on the big green image at the bottom of the first post. It says something like “Vista RTM Sidebar for Windows XP”. For anyone that is confused or doesn’t understand what’s going on, all you need to do is install VIAOXP/2003, make sure you have IE7, WMP11 and KB918997 installed, and follow the rest of the instructions.