Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget and Standalone :: FTP-BOX

• Download source files - 2,613.1 KB
• Download FTP zip - 1,954.3 KB

Introduction

FTP-Box is a basic FTP-client for the Windows Sidebar. It supports upload/download/delete commands, drag & drop, periodic file list updating, action progress bars and a detail-view-flyout. The gadget's primary concept is a cross-computer/cross-platform 'clipboard' to quickly access and/or share files.

Background

FTP-box was created in between 2 weeks. It was used to test the implementation of a Blackboard-architecture. However, quite a lot of time had to be spent to cope with technical problems concerning drag & drop as well as the integration of .NET components into the gadget. Speaking of which we explicitly want to thank the authors of the following articles for their valuable hints:

• A Gadget to control a cell phone
• Remote Control for Winamp - creating a skinnable Sidebar Gadget
• Adding Drag and Drop to an Explorer Tree Control
• How to drag a virtual file from your app into Windows Explorer
• C# File Browser

Special kudos go to the authors of the following articles, whose components and code parts have been used in this gadget:

• .NET Interop for Gadgets – A C# GMail Inbox Reader Example for the function to register a COM-component
• FTP client library for C# for basic FTP-functions
• XPTable - .NET ListView meets Java's JTable for the XPTable-component to display the progress of the FTP-actions

Using the code

The FTP-box-gadget was implemented into .NET as ActiveX-controls and was applied to the gadget's HTML code via the object-tag. The FTP-box's source code consists of two parts: HTML and JacaScript- Code was placed in the 'ftp-box.gadget directory'. The 'assemblies' directory contains the .NET Code solution.

.NET-Code

The solution dissects in multiple projects. The gadget's core project is DSn.FtpBox. The subfolder Impl contains the modules' implementations the gadget is based on.

Build

When building a release, a directory named 'Dist' is created within the FTP-Box' main folder the zipped gadget is placed in. There is an additional .msi file to the .gadget file with which you can install the gadget as a standalone-application. Both install versions are completely independent of one another. Both the Sidebar-gadget and the standalone can be installed individually or together.

Points of Interest

As already mentioned in the 'Build' section, the gadget can also be used as standalone- application. A basic gadget host was implemented for this function's sake, which picks up the FTP-box' components. The result is a standard EXE file which can be run in Windows-versions other than Vista.