The Moth

When I introduced the SideShow gadget fundamentals, I listed 3 types of communication between the gadget running on the PC and the SideShow-compatible device. You know how to design your SCF content and then download it via the managed API. Here I will introduce notifications and events.

Notification
Sending a notification down to the device takes one line of code, given that you already have a ScfSideShowGadget reference as described before:

Icon ico = new Icon(@"C:\Users\Public\Pictures\SideShow\SSnotification.ico");
g.ShowNotification(
                100,      // unique content id
                "some caption", // caption
                "some message", // body
                ico,            // icon to appear on the far right of the body
                TimeSpan.FromSecondss(30)); // timeout interval

Executing the above will result in the behaviour captured below on the SideShow simulator:

The notification will time out after the timeout period specified or the user can manually dismiss it with the ENTER button or, finally, you can programmatically dismiss a notification by its id e.g. g.RevokeNotification(100); or a more brutal approach g.RevokeAllNotifications;

Events
There are 9 events that you can handle programmatically on the PC-side while the user performs actions. The following code shows hooking up to them

g.AllDevicesRemoved += new EventHandler(g_AllDevicesRemoved);
g.ContentMissing += new EventHandler <ContentMissingEventArgs> (g_ContentMissing);
g.ContentNavigate += new EventHandler <ContentNavigateEventArgs> (g_ContentNavigate);
g.ContextMenuSelect += new EventHandler <ContextMenuSelectEventArgs> (g_ContextMenuSelect);
g.DeviceAdded += new EventHandler <DeviceCapabilityEventArgs> (g_DeviceAdded);
g.DeviceRemoved += new EventHandler <DeviceCapabilityEventArgs> (g_DeviceRemoved);
g.GadgetEnter += new EventHandler(g_GadgetEnter);
g.GadgetExit += new EventHandler(g_GadgetExit);
g.MenuSelect += new EventHandler <MenuSelectEventArgs>(g_MenuSelect);

- GadgetEnter, GadgetExit when the user navigates from the glance data page (id=0) to the SCF pages and back.
- DeviceAdded, DeviceRemoved, AllDevicesRemoved when SideShow-compatible device connect or disconnect from this gadget.
- MenuSelect, ContextMenuSelect when the user selects one of your menus or opens your contextmenus.
- ContentNavigate every time the user traverses from one SCF page to another.
- ContentMissing if a user action results in a request for a content id that is not on the device.

The event handler method signatures for these follow the standard .NET pattern of having two parameters. The first being the sender object and the second being a type that inherits from EventArgs. The following class diagram shows the EventArgs classes with their members so you can get an idea of the information you receive with each event mentioned above:


Stay tuned on this blog for more on SideShow gadget development in the new year ;-)