I wrote my first gadget for http://www.live.com yesterday; the MSN Spaces Photo Album Browser. Screenshot below
It didn't take that long but it was a frustrating experience trying
to find documentation. I resorted to a combination of combing the
Microsoft Gadgets forums, reading the source code of existing gadgets and
reading the sparse documentation at http://www.start.com/developer. We definitely have a lot of work to do in making this stuff more accessible to developers.
While working on it, I did get a fantastic tip for debugging Javascript from Matt.
I didn't realize that I could use Visual Studio to debug any Javascript
currently running in Internet Explorer in three steps. This is also
explained in the IE blog post Scripting Debugging in Internet Explorer
- In Internet Explorer, select Tools->Internet Options…->Advanced->Disable Script Debugging
- In Visual Studio, select Debug->Processes
- In the Processes dialog, select the IE process you want to debug and then click the Attach button
That's it. Now you can set breakpoints and party like its 1999.
Being able to debug script in this manner saved me hours of wasted time
because it let me know that the object models exposed by http://www.live.com and http://www.start.com are different. Somebody definitely needs to hustle and get some documentation updated.