I’m about 75% through writing the manuscript for a Sidebar gadget development book. The pre-order page made it to Amazon, so I need to finish it, right?

I’m into some of the more advanced AJAX topics. Since these gadgets are exclusive to Vista, I have to assume that a good chunk of developers interested in them are also using .Net backend web servers. So I’m including a bit about the ASP.NET AJAX framework to save people the trouble of manually writing JavaScript code to build SOAP messages.

At first glance, I was impressed both by the framework and by the extensive effort from Microsoft to make it easy to use. There’s helpful how-to videos on the site that really make it easy to understand. There’s information for adapting the framework for use with other non-MS server-side technologies.

And to top it all off — there’s a full set of pre-built, AJAX-ian web controls called the Control Toolkit that snaps on top of the framework. After seeing the ease of adapting the framework for gadgets, I assumed the controls relied on JS libraries that could be copied out and used inside a Sidebar gadget.

In the end, I discovered that the controls are actually compiled… into a DLL. For a second there, I really thought I had landed into a whole new world of .Net development. A land where community replaced proprietary. A place where building a simple web site didn’t require a 2 gigabyte development suite.

But it’s still the same as it ever was. I can’t easily recommend Microsoft’s AJAX control toolkit for use in their own gadget platform. Somehow the simplicity of plain text HTML and JavaScript code needed to get wrapped up into DLL hell.