Faster Windows Gadget development & testing
September 27, 2009 by Dave
Testing and debugging of Windows Sidebar Gadgets may be painful if you wish to test or debug a gadget that has a configuration. Removing and re-creating a gadget by dragging it out of the Gadget window will delete any saved configuration. I’ve found that I would like to restart the sidebar and refresh all the gadgets at once. Restarting the Sidebar process is also the only way to flush the image cache. If you’re having caching problems, restarting the Sidebar will reload the data from disk.
To restart the sidebar with just a click – create the following batch file:
taskkill /F /IM sidebar.exe && "c:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar\sidebar.exe"
Save the file as restart_sidebar.bat. Elevation is not required to restart the sidebar.