I've been playing around with Vista a bit and discovered Vista Calendar. I've got a copy of Office Ultimate, so I'll doubtless use Outlook instead, but it's still kinda nice. I think eventually we'll see things like that migrate to OS-level datastore services - kinda like the 'Common RSS feed store' thing - so that you have one calendar across all applications and they can all make use of it as necessary.

But, anyway. I noticed that Vista Calendar supports 'subscribing' to calendars on the web - it can be set up to check an URL on a regular basis, retrieving events and putting them in your calendar. I think that's pretty cool. I followed the links from the MS site out to some calendar repositories and picked up a calendar that records all the UK national holidays, which is handy.

(Can you guess where I'm going with this yet?)

Looking over the other available calendars, however, I didn't see much that really interested me. So, I figured, why not create my own? And what better data to feed it with than the GDNet Events page?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the GDNet Game Industry Events calendar (beta), in iCalendar 2.0 format. I've tested it with Vista Calendar, iCal on OS X, and Google Calendar, and it all seems to work fairly spiffily. If you try it out, please let me know how you find it.

Most of what I've written is just an XSLT sheet for formatting the XML data returned by the events scheduler, which means I could easily reuse it for other systems that use the same XML schema. One such system is the GDNet Gathering; once I'm confident that it's working acceptably for the general events page, it should be easy to provide calendar feeds for GDNet Gathering groups.