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I'm developing a very simple gadget for Windows 7. I have created an index.html file and a gadget.xml file, compressed them as a zip, changed the extension to gadget. When I double click on the .gadget file I get a window telling me if I'm sure I want to install the gadget as it comes from an untrusted publisher. I click 'Install', and everything seems to be fine. However, the gadget is not installed. I've looked at the Event Viewer and found nothing, it just silently fails. Anyone knows what I might be doing wrong? Here's the gadget.xml file:

<name>Elecciones 2011</name>
<author name="whatever">
    <info url="hiddenforpublicpublish" />
    <host name="sidebar">
        <base type="HTML" apiVersion="1.0.0" src="index.html" />
        <platform minPlatformVersion="1.0" />
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3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

You need to create a .zip which has all the files directly in it.

What you probably have done is, put index.html and gadget.xml in a folder, zipped the folder.

What really needs to be done is, select index.html, gadget.xml and other files and folder and make a .zip out of it.

This was the issue I had faced, and doing this solved the problem.

Please check if that works.


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That was it, cheers mate! –  brafales Apr 14 '11 at 10:33
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  1. download gadget
  2. rename to rar extension from gadget extension
  3. go to C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets
  4. extract all rename files with the same gadget file name like "new.gadget"
  5. move the extracted folders to that directory. (to C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets)

now you are done, problem solved.

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I had issues with the version number, I thought it had to be:


not x.x.x.x

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