I am officially announcing the Overlay Project. What is it? Well, per the project home page:

Overlay is a software project that will build a virtual desktop comprised of "Widget" components. The main highlights of Overlay include:

• Virtual desktop accessible from a TaskBar icon or "hot key" sequence
• Component model for the creation of Widgets that can be easily created and added to Overlay
• "Toast" notifications to allow Widgets to notify user of important events
• Configuration management to store user preferences of Overlay and Widget settings
• Security to protect against malicious or ill behaved Widgets
• Other stuff I haven't thought of yet

I am also going to try and leverage as much free code as I can. As I build out this project over the next few weeks (or months), I will provide references to the code, articles, concepts, whatever that I am borrowing from aroudn the web. I have been thinking about this for a while, so I already have a good idea on where a bulk of the materials will come from.

The project itself probably has no real value, but its may be an interesting excercise and will provide me a chance to code for the sake of coding. (I know, SlickThought was to do the same thing but I have been in a bit of a coding hiatus since I am waiting for Beta 2 and the GoLive licensing before I make any more signficant changes). Some things I expect to use in this project include: P/Invoke, reflections, Enterprise Library, WinForm trickery, .NET security, appdomains, and other stuff I haven't thought of yet.

I will be posting updates on Overlay in a new blog category, so those of you with custom filters will need to update your filter if you are interested in the updates.