We've all seen these widgets on your iGoogle page, but what a lot of people don't realize is they can be very profitable. I have a friend who is currently recieving an average of $400 a month and rising by creating one of these very simple apps.

Without further ado lets get knee deep into making one of these gadgets. Go to the following link: http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/gs.html#GGE. Once there you will see the following web based application google makes available.

Now you can read all of googles documentation but making a widget for google is so easy that I'll be able to tell you in literally one sentence. To make a widget simply add standard HTML where hello world! currently is. Thats it! Want more complex examples than a hello world? The API Examples at the top of this app will repopulate the editor with the more complex code. Hit the preview button to view what your code has actually done. To add this to your iGoogle page hit the add Google button at the bottom. Stay tuned, tommorow I'll talk about how to bind data and include google ads right in your widget.  

Almost no info on this bug but it appeared on a co-workers machine. Basically the Property window is empty and will not populate for any reason. The solution that appears to work is to do the following:

1. Go to start -> Programs -> Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 -> Visual Studio Tools -> Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt

2. Once in there type the following: devenv /setup

3. Restart Visual Studios and you should be good.

Essentially what the command does is it  merges the resource metadata that describes menus, toolbars, and command groups from all VSPackages available.

link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ex6a2fad(VS.80).aspx

There really isn't a lot on the net about this, and the material I did find was lacking. So here is my code block for sending emails using ASP.Net System.Mail class passing in credentials.

You will need the following using statements at the top, System.Web.Mail and this is for dotnet 2.0 or 3.5 frameworks.

After much searching on the web for a decent blogging engine that is built off of dotnet, I was left empty handed. The best I could do was BlogEngine.net for the time being. I am going to be starting up a project to develop a new blogger that will use the MVC framework. The advantages of using MVC is that it interprets URLs and displays HTML views based on the URL.

Ex: www.codingsmarter.com\article\MVCBlogging is all that is needed with MVC, that same page using traditional asp.net pages would be something along the lines of www.codingsmarter.com\default.aspx?article=MVCBlogger . The reason this sucks is because google will drop off anything after the ? for search engine purposes, and you are left with a diminished ranking in the search engine.

More to follow later on this project.