Update: We had a small hiccup with the build that went on Windows Live Gallery but this has been fixed and re-uploaded. Sorry to anyone that downloaded the non-working version.

Auction Sidebar Tool 2.91 has just been accepted onto Windows Live Gallery and is now available for download.  This new release adds a few new features as well as some behind the scenes bug fixes and improvements.  New features in this release are as follows:

• Integration with the eBay Client Alerts API - this new feature allows us to connect to eBay's services more frequently and efficiently to update item and My eBay bidding, watching and selling list statuses.
• Basic list sorting - You can now right click and sort item lists by ascending or descending order based on item price, title or time left.
• New loading method for .NET extensions.

Read on for more information or download now from Windows Live Gallery.

The eBay Client Alerts API

We spotted recently that there was a lot of activity caused by the BrowserSync feature that identifies when you add an item to the watch list, bid on an item or perform some other action that required fetching fresh eBay data. Whilst we were happy that this was working well, we were a bit apprehensive about how inefficient it is and how many times it can fire off false positives, meaning that BrowserSync would think you had performed an action on eBay when, in fact, it was mistaken. The details made available to BrowserSync are only publically available bits of information that we can get from the browser, so sometimes we have to just guess that the action you performed required an update of information to the gadget. Fortunately for us, eBay introduced the Client Alerts API some time ago which helps in this area immensely. With the Client Alerts API, whenever you perform an action on eBay, it is logged on eBay's servers, ready to be retrieved by any applications registered for use of the API. These actions are known of events and include adding items to watch lists, placing bids, items ending early, outbid notifications, received feedback and more. Now, whenever you trigger one of these events on eBay, BrowserSync will still guess that it needs to fetch data but instead of just fetching the data blindly, it "asks" Client Alerts for any event information that might be available. This information is then used to update your lists, items, feedback score, etc. Clever, right?

Go ahead and try it. After adding an item to your watch list it should appear in the gadget around 5 seconds or so later.

Basic list sorting

This is all pretty self explanatory. In the right-click menu for items in your lists, you can now choose the sorting method. Items can be sorted ascending or descending by price, title, or time remaining. We've been meaning to add this feature for a while and it was good to finally get around to it.

New loading method for .NET extensions

Over the years Auction Sidebar Tool has been available, we've noticed that some machines may have trouble uninstalling or updating a gadget unless Windows Sidebar is or Windows Desktop Gadgets are restarted. This is due to a problem gadgets have with ActiveX controls (that act as plugins and extensions for gadgets). When a gadget with an ActiveX control is started, the ActiveX control's file is locked open by Windows Sidebar and cannot be deleted even if the gadget is closed again. This can be a real pain if you are updating from an old version to a new version because the new version cannot install over the top of the old version because it will fail to delete the old version's ActiveX control. The only way to work around this (until now) was to restart Windows or the sidebar.exe process after closing the gadget.

We decided this wasn't an acceptable method of loading plugins in Windows Desktop Gadgets, and set to work researching a new method. What we came up with was a new ActiveX object that is intended to reside outside of the gadget's folder, something that all gadgets could communicate with and use. This ActiveX object is then asked to load the extension instead of loading it directly. This means that when the gadget is closed we can unload the extension and release the lock on the file. The loading ActiveX object remains locked but it doesn't matter because it is copied to a different folder before initialization.

Our .NET developer should be posting more details about this soon, along with the script source code and assembly file that you can use to load your own plugins. We figured that if everyone used the same method to load, this would help improve how gadgets work for all gadget users and developers. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please ask them in our developer help forums.