Vista Sidebar Gadgets are HTML pages!

Yep, you heard me right, the vista sidebar gadgets are tiny html pages with images and JScript (aka javascript).  

Even the clock app is a simple background image with two clock hands as images.

They do have a gadget API which can rotate images. This is how they achieve the nice animation on the clock, for example.

You can browse the source code for every gadget that comes with Vista by going here:

C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\

 

I was amazed when I found this out!  For some reason I assumed they were fancy WPF apps.

If you're interested you can read more on msdn.

Vista Sleep Issues Solved

I finally found outhow to troubleshoot Vista sleep issues.  Specifically, how to tell what woke the computer.

By using "powercfg lastwake" on the command prompt, I could at least tell that it was a USB device.

A little peeking into Device Manager  and I noticed both my mouse and keyboard were allowed to wake the PC.  (Normally this is probably a good thing.)  I simply disabled that feature and my problem is fixed.

Big thanks to the people over on vistax64 where I found my solution