• Financial management: Microsoft Dynamics solutions help you maintain control of your finances and manage them with a high level of efficiency. You can make complete, current financial information and reports available to anybody who needs it to perform business planning. Simplify and automate routine and repetitious functions, so your employees can focus on more critical tasks. Use Microsoft Dynamics to create the required financial and other reporting needed to realize flawless regulatory compliance.

• Customer relationship management (CRM): Microsoft Dynamics CRM and other customer relationship management tools help you maintain close contact with your customers and prospects, and manage sales and marketing initiatives and track their results. Microsoft Dynamics can also assist you in identifying emerging customer needs early and respond to them before the competitors do.

• Supply chain management: With Microsoft Dynamics, you can connect your entire supply chain in a productive, fast-moving flow. Assess the business value of your vendor and business partner relationships to make sure they suit your objectives. Offer sophisticated communicative, collaborative, and self-service capabilities to make it easy and compelling for other companies to do business with you. Increase efficiencies in distribution to improve customer satisfaction and reduce the cost of doing business.

The applications are available on PCs running either the Windows Vista operating system, or using a Firefox web browser.

The widgets are accessed on Vista via the operating system’s side panel. The weather for a specified location is displayed, together with information such as radar or satellite images. On Firefox the information is displayed in a sidebar, and this can be expanded to include any of the available options.

The Met Office has issued the widgets as part of its remit to provide forecasts, and severe weather warnings, to enable UK citizens to make informed decisions in order to protect life, welfare and property.

Just like the Zune you can browse through songs and albums, all the buttons on the gadget work as they would on the real thing. It will also utilise any album art you have already set up in Windows Media Player, which is rather smart.

The gadget offers a decent set of options too. You can change the background of the gadget, the colour of the Zune (restricted to three colours at the moment - and no pink for the ladies). You can also change the reaction time for the hover-over scroll wheels, and list all the keybord shortcuts too.

I think this is a fantastic release personally! Even if you don’t have a Zune, this gadget offers a comprehensive and solid media playback option for the Vista sidebar - so go and grab it now!

The gadget does the job of a whois lookup perfectly well, but I’d personally like to see more functionality! Perhaps have the domain info open in a flyout window, rather than loading a browser window. If a flyout isn’t possible, then I’d at least like to see the gadget making use of some more of the DomainTools feature set - all from a single micro-interface.

I think Nathan deserves a big round of applause for his hard work and persistence with the series of articles, and I look forward to his future roundups! Good luck with finding something to buy with that Dell voucher mate!

The competition is now complete, and it resulted in 29 entries - and considering that Code Project was hoping for 20 they’re quite pleased! The source code for the top 10 gadgets has been downloaded by about 159,000 developers. Here’s the winners:

Soapbox Videogadget
This is quite an addictive litte gadget that pull some of the best RSS feeds from the Soapbox on MSN Video Beta page, including “Most Popular Videos”, “Most Rated videos”, and “Most Recent Videos”.

The idea behind this gadget is to use those regularly updated feeds to show your choice of video from the sidebar. It functions in a similar manner to Daily Dilbert - probably because they were written by the same guy!

.NET Interop for Gadgets
While there is a gadget for download, this is far more about a programming technique for other gadget developers.
The developer uses the building of a Gmail Checker Gadget to illustrate the building of an interop layer between gadgets and .NET so you can run any .NET code from your sidebar gadget.

Mobilis Immobile (honourable mention)
This is a Google Virtual Earth slide show Gadget, and it allows you to view cool places in several sizes, along with information about what you’re seeing. You can even set it up to point to custom locations.

Travel the world without moving from the front of your screen! Not really useful as such, but still fascinating!

So… If you’ve been put off browsing the site in the past - then it’s definitely worth checking out again.

Oh, and thanks to Law for the heads-up on this one!

So… I’m looking for ideas. Is there a gadget that you desparately want to see exist, or perhaps you’ve seen a good gadget that would be great with just a few tweaks?

Tell me your idea, and if I decided to make it then not only will your idea be made real, but you’ll get mentioned (and linked to) in the credits!

Issue 9 of his regular series includes a mish-mash of the latest gadgets to be released. The SayaTV Gadget is interesting - in that it’s the first to offer live TV from the Sidebar.

I’m also a fan of Garfield, so I was pleased to see a gadget to display the comic daily - but it turned out to be pretty useless, so I’ll just have to keep visiting the site until I get a chance to release one that works properly!

Oh, and the Babe Slide Show Gadget has been upgraded to version 2. I still don’t see the fascination of seeing a thumnail of a bikini-clad girl in your Sidebar - but it’s getting an an awful lot of downloads!

I’m looking forward to Nathan’s 10th edition, which will apparently be an all-time best of the best special.

However, with three of them not working, one with errors, one that crashes your sidebar, and at least one that’s totally pointless (i.e. just pointing to a web page) - perhaps Nathan should consider removing the word ‘good’ from the title? I’d personally rather see a weekly roundup of the absolute best that there is out there, rather than a mediocre snapshot of everything. Sorry Nathan!

Definitely worth checking out for one or two though. SysInfo for example is an excellent multi-purpose clock!