SideShow designer: ISV opportunity

Thu, January 18, 2007, 04:20 AM under Windows | Vista | SideShow
I am really pleased that Scott is jumping on the SideShow train :-)

Windows SideShow provides an opportunity for every manufacturer that has a device with a screen on it to SideShow-enable it. It also provides an opportunity for all application developers to extend the reach of their application by either directly calling the SideShow API from their existing app to send content to SideShow-compatible displays, or to write a new non-UI process (a SideShow gadget) that sends the content.

There is another opportunity here for ISVs. Provide a graphical designer for generating SCF, which application developers can then easily send down to the devices. Crafting SCF by hand or using the managed API’s Scf class is trivial but still not as smooth as using a graphical designer (a bit like designing Windows Forms without the designer or even closer a bit like crafting XAML by hand without "Sparkle"/"Cider").

So what are you waiting for? The schema is there, the elements (think controls) have only a few attributes (think properties) and there can only be a single element/control per row/line... show me what you can do!

UPDATE: The Microsoft.SideShow.dll (written by Jeffrey Richter) that I have been using in all my posts is now publicly available. Details here :-)