vista sidebar on XP

So, I was perusing codeproject.com and I came across their current Vista Gadgets Competition. Well, this sparked my interest, not because I am interested in prizes, but because until now, I hadn't heard of Gadgets, or the Vista Sidebar, or really much about Vista at all.

The reason for this is that, I, being slightly conservative regarding willy-nilly-ly installing new OSes as soon as they are available, choose to upgrade by force, only when absolutely unable to do otherwise. That means, I'm running Windows XP. So what is a developer to do now that his interest is piqued? Install Vista so I can play with Gadgets and the mystical sidebar? No! I, of course, choose to google up a nice patched version of sidebar.exe that can run on XP!

Woohoo! I'm excited to say, that this not only works, but works without a hitch. I was able to install and run the Vista Sidebar on XP in mere moments. And that also means I can fiddle with widgets, oops I mean Gadgets. ;)

See my next few posts for more information about Gadgets... But before you do, download the XP version of Windows Sidebar so you can join in the fun too!

Links and knowledge courtesy of MSTN and their article about this, which I found out about by reading this blog post on My Digital Life.