The "Event Listing" is a gadget for the Windows Vista sidebar, which reads data from an external xml source containing multiple events and displays them. It uses the built-in functions to provide a settings dialog and a fly-out panel, which shows detailed information about the currently selected event. You can install it like every other gadget from the provided source code. It uses an example xml file which is hosted online.

This gadget will only be usable if you’re running it under Windows Vista. Download the Events.gadget file to your desktop and simply double-click it. Windows Vista will automatically install it to the Sidebar folder. To install the gadget locally, you’ll need administrator privileges. Go to the “Add gadget” menu of the Sidebar and add the EventsListing gadget.

Every event belongs to a certain subset of a list of categories. The user can choose all the categories he's interested in by selecting them in the settings dialog. The selection is saved to the local storage using the System.Gadget.Settings functions.

There is also the possibility to add a registration date and an alert to an event in the xml file. If an alert message is provided, the event has a special alert icon and the user can see the alert message as a tooltip. The registration date is another special property of an event. If it is during the next three days, the event is displayed using an other color which should alert the user that the event is coming up soon.

The code is documented and straightforward. All content is shown using manipulation of existing html elements using the innerHTML property. Please refer to the online documentation on http://gallery.live.com to learn the basics of javascript gadget programming.