Silverlight Sidebar Gadgets in 64bit Vista

As a matter of 'fact' Silverlight doesn't run in a 64bit IE browser... ok fine but if your running 64bit Vista you probably won’t see this as an issue as the default is the 32bit version that runs fine. And I'm sure at some point Silverlight will work in 64bit version of Vista. But the side bar gadget framework is in fact paired with the OS type so on a 64bit version of Vista... no Silverlight for you.

Ok so I'm not really that patient with waiting for the new wiz bang 2.0 version of silverlight that is 64bit so I have this little hack... installer that will correct the problem and allow 'Silverlight' to run in the side bar of a 64bit version of Vista.

If you are not running a 64bit version of Vista then this email is not important. No need to read farther.

So I started to go down the road of mucking up my regestry to do this but that proved to time consuming so I have built this simple code base (and silverlight gadget) so I can get my silverlight gadgets to run in my sidebar on my 64bit version of vista.

http://www.HackingSilverlight.net/Samples/Sidebar32on64.Codebase.zip

and gadget:

http://www.HackingSilverlight.net/Samples/Blender.Gadget

So basically there are two binaries. One will search the running processes and kill the sidebar process and then spins up the 32bit version. The next basically installs the other and sets it up to run each time a user logs in so they get the 32bit version of the side bar that actually supports Silverlight.