I may have mentioned before that Tatham Oddie and myself will be doing a presentation at TechEd. Part of that talk will involve the use of 'Gadgets'. I thought it best to provide a little insight into what I am actually talking about here.

I am talking specifically about web based gadgets. Gadgets are much like RSS feeds except that instead of just supplying information about a feed, a gadget will contain behavour. For a web gadget, this typically involves some DHTML/Javascript to make that behavour happen. Gadgets are a singular piece of functionality that you can add to a dashboard or individually manage in some other way.

Some excellent examples of Gadgets can be found at the Microsoft Gadgets site, Start.com and Live.com. You have also seen the desktop equivalent of gadgets in Windows Vista and the gadgets that exist along the sidebar.

You may be saying, "Eeeww, programming components with Javascript to get Gadgets...", well that is where Atlas comes in. Atlas makes creating gadgets, and complying to the requisite interfaces to make them installable, very easy. To find out how easy, you'll just have to come along to the presentation....