PowerGadgets Creator is a PowerShell development tool that allows you to create Windows Sidebar Gadgets for Vista and desktop gauges for XP. What can I say? If you like gadgets, you will love this tool. I downloaded PowerGadgets and installed it on my Vista box, not really knowing what to expect. Starting up the tool immediately opened a wizard that walked me through connecting to a database and all the other op PowerGadgets Creator is a PowerShell development tool that allows you to create Windows Sidebar Gadgets for Vista and desktop gauges for XP. What can I say? If you like gadgets, you will love this tool. I downloaded PowerGadgets and installed it on my Vista box, not really knowing what to expect. Starting up the tool immediately opened a wizard that walked me through connecting to a database and all the other options I needed to create my gadget. You simply choose the data set you want and a graph style, save it, and your gadget is created. It’s that simple. It took me around 10 minutes from start to finish to create my first gadget, and honestly, most of that time was spent perfecting the chart properties. The designer (shown below) lets you make any change to a gadget at any time. This means you can use certain gadgets as templates if you like. The designer lets you make any change to a gadget at any time. This allows you to use certain gadgets as templates if you like.DBAs (like me) can use gadgets to keep track of performance stats right on their desktops. A simple graph shows me stats from several systems. Likewise, business users could get metrics on anything they like without having to write any code. As long as the data is coming from a database, you can get it with the wizard. That’s not to say that you’re limited to database queries. You can write any PowerShell, WMI, or VBScript script you want and package it up yourself. The wizard is a quick way to get started, but the command line is much more powerful. Anything you can get from the command line can be captured, and you can turn it all into nice graphs, gauges, pie charts, etc. I’ve already created several different gadgets, and I don’t know the first thing about PowerShell. PowerGadgets Creator Price: $299 for one Creator license; $599 for one Creator and 10 end user licenses; $999 for 25 client package Verdict: This tool for creating real-time charts, gauges, and graphs for Windows Vista and XP is nothing short of amazing. You can choose any kind of data you like, and a wizard walks you through every step of the way. Using some simple tricks, you can also incorporate these dashboard components into Web pages and other applications. — Sean McCown Sean McCown is the senior data warehouse DBA for First American Title and contributing editor to InfoWorld. He is author of InfoWorld’s Database Underground and DBA Rant. Technology Industry