I wrote DeskMinder as a Christmas gift for my family and friends. It originated as just a bit of HTML and JavaScript as an Active Desktop component for reminding me when special occasions were drawing near, like family members' birthdays and anniversaries. To make it easier to customize the events, I wrote a Windows Forms event editor that goes along with it.

The most difficult bit was trying to automatically install the widget as an Active Desktop component. My current implementation is pretty flakey, so if anyone knows of an elegant way of getting a component on the desktop, please let me know. Fortunately, once you do manage to get it on your desktop, its pretty smooth sailing from then on.

There were other challenges that I ran into as well, such as a mysterious movement of events from one day to the previous when data files traveled west. That turned out to be an XML serialization problem related to time zones, as described here. I've also struggled with using the application settings paths such as Application.UserAppDataPath. No, I really don't want to store my settings per version, and if I happen to rebrand my application, I don't want the settings directory to move. I think I got those mainly figured out, and support for this kind of thing seems like it will be better with .NET 2.0.

In any case, I've just finished with a new version that supports a "quote of the day" style feature, so I thought I'd post it here on esmithy.net. You can find it in the software section.