If you want to do any sort of local Microsoft gadget development and testing with Visual Studio 2003 or Visual Studio 2005 .NET on a Windows XP Machine you’ll need to set up a local webserver. The following instructions were written by Forser and myself and intended to be published at our script school blog, but is being published here first.

1. First take a look if you have IIS already installed or not.
Go to control panel / Administrative Control and look if you have an icon saying Internet Information Services.

If you don’t then you have to install IIS by following these few steps.

(Note: if you are using Windows XP Home, then you will need to see these instructions)

2. Go to Control Panel and click Add or Remove Programs and click Add/Remove Windows Components.

3. Click the Internet Information Services (IIS) checkbox and press Next to install, You need the CD during the install.

Afterwards you check if you have the Internet Information Service icon under Control Panel / Administrative Tools.

If you have the Icon then next step is to install the ASP.net.

5. Start a command by selecting Start / Run and type cmd

Now you should have a CMD window open.

6. Now go to your dotnet folder in windows

cd \windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\Version\

Replace Version with the dotNet version you have installed, like v1.1.4322 is dotNET v1.1 and v2.0.50727 is dotNET v2.0

7. in that folder you type aspnet_regiis.exe -i and it will say Finished installing ASP.NET (1.1.4322.0) if you install v1.1.4322 that is.

8. Afterwards you close the cmd by typing exit and it will close the window.
9. Go to Control Panel / Administrative Tools and click the Internet Information Services icon so the internet information service manager starts.

10. Now press the + next to the name and right click Web Sites and select properties and look under the ISAPI Filters after ASP.NET name, if it shows up then you have ASP.net installed.

11. Now to install the Microsoft Gadgets, Firstly you need to unpack the gadgets file you downloaded from Microsoftgadgets.com into a folder like c:\gadgets\

12. Now, press the + next to Web Sites in Internet Information Service and right-click Default Web Sites and select New > Virtual Directory

13. Press Next on the first screen, Enter a alias on the next screen like Gadgets and press Next.
Now select Browse and point it to your directory where you installed the Gadgets like c:\gadgets\ and press Next and on next screen let it be the default Access Permissions and just press Next and then Finish.

14. Now you need to add Live.com to your Internet Explorer Trusted Sites by going to Control Panel, select Internet Options and there select the Security Page, click the Trusted Sites Icon and press Sites so it looks like the picture below.

15. Now enter http://www.live.com and press Add, Make sure that you don’t have the Require server verification (https:) for all sites in this zone checked.

To see if the samples work type http://localhost/gadgets/hello/helloworldgadget.xml (or the name of the xml file if it’s changed, see the XML file name inside the Hello folder) and it should show you the XML for the hello world sample.

16. Next is to add your sample/work to the http://www.live.com site.
First go to it with Internet Explorer and press Add Content and you will see a Search box under Add Content., Press Advanced Options and enter http://localhost/gadgets/hello/hello.xml into the Add a Gadget by URL box and press Add.

Now it should show the Hello World gadget under My Web if working, and if you press the gadget name Hello World you will get a question if you want to install it.

17. Press Install Gadget and it will run the Gadget on the website and you will see it saying Hello World.

Now you are done and can continue to play around and develop your own gadgets, read more on Microsoft Gadgets which is a gadget gallery, development forum and blog. Also, coming soon is dev.live.com which will be a primary development area for live.com-related projects.

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