Y'know, I don't generally consider myself a stupid hillbilly but I have to say that doing stuff in Atlas that's outside the scope of the documentation is pretty hard. My latest abandoned-for-now project is embedding extender controls from the Atlas Control Toolkit into Gadgets for use in live.com.

Seems Gadgets don't allow server-side controls, which is understandable, so I was looking for a way to embed extenders into my page with javascript. Thanks to the clear and surprisingly prompt responses of honorary hillbilly, Ted Glaza, I am now on my way to having a page with client-created Atlas controls. (By the by, the Atlas Control Toolkit codebase is now completely public, including the ExtenderBase. Doesn't look like that's quite in the CTP yet but check out the latest source.)

Unfortunately, it seems like there are issues with Atlas Gadgets themselves on live.com. I have been able to install a basic Atlas gadget that contains only the word, "moo". But I have yet to be able to successfully remove it from my live.com page. Whenever I try, I am redirected to my gadget's XML. Others are having different issues, so until those are resolved, I have enough problems to deal with just trying to get my project working on a basic functionality level, let alone as a Gadget.

But if these little kinks do eventually work themselves out, this will be a tremendous boon to Gadget development. The existing SDK leaves much to be desired. Seems like a big step backward to have to build your entire thingamabob in javascript.

This week's "oh yeah" moment for migrating from an old laptop to a new one: Indexing Service index for a document repository and the corresponding SQL Server linked server that lets me query the repository along with SQL metadata.

*UPDATE* Sweet Jayzus, I need to type these things up faster or install dasBlog 1.9.