I decided to take a break from setting up my new Vista development system and try out some coding for a bit instead.
Today, I played around wtih Vista Sidebar Gadgets. I wanted to see if it was possible to leverage Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in a sidebar. Turns out you can. In fact, you can drop in an inkable InkCanvas extremely easily too. Without too much work, here's what I came up with:

You can see the inkable gadget at the top right of the Vista desktop image. Nothing special. Just a white box with some blue grid lines and some ink I wrote on the surface.
Here's the same gadget, undocked. The gadget grows in size when undocked to make it easier to scribble notes.

There's not much else to the gadget at this point. It doesn't persist the ink, nor provide any user options to set the pen color, pen thickness, background, and so on. I'll post the code--maybe later night after I get some of my emails anwered that have stacked up--or more likely tomorrow. There's really not that much to the code, so hopefully someone can take it and run with it. If nothing else it's a simple Hello Ink! Sidebar Gadget.
OK. I've run out of my coding playtime....I've gotta get some "real" work done....
Update: I posted the executable for the InkPad Sidebar Gadget here.


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