It has been an emotional three years on the TechNet platform and I want to say thank you for all the loyal readers out there that have put up with all my ramblings for long enough.  See you on the other side, and have fun! :-)

All the best,

James

The only caveat is that submitted applications must use Live Search APIs! You can create apps on whatever platform or language you prefer and you can also use any other APIs that you want from other service providers.

Why not take this opportunity to check out the other APIs provided by Live Services so you can build them in too! https://dev.live.com

IDEA: An app that incorporates search and Messenger would be pretty cool for sharing interesting search results with your friends.

More information on the competition here:

https://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2009/04/14/will-you-code-for-green-this-spring.aspx

Whilst the browser is great for some types of apps like collaboration, sharing, broadcasting it’s far from perfect.  The number one problem is speed.  A browser is slow.  Why do you think Google have been trying so hard to speed up their JavaScript engine? No matter how much tweaking they do they’ll always be slower though.  Client apps, i.e. ones that can harness the power of the device they are running on are much quicker, have richer experiences and can do things the browser simply can’t, utilize multi-core for example.

Look at Twitter, quite frankly their website is poor.  It’s constantly broken, slow, yesterday I tried to register an account – I got the fail whale.  Not good.  How then, are they so successful?  Why do people continue to use Twitter?  It’s about the APIs and the way you can develop applications on their service.  TweetDeck has been very successful because it provides a better experience for the service than anyone else – far better than Twitter.com even.  Could you build a website in AJAX that was as slick as TweetDeck? No, because the app has the browser in the way of that computing muscle.

When the walled gardens fall as services become more open and data portability becomes the norm, the one true differentiator will be user experience.  If I can get a better user experience on a client application then I will use it, period. 

Now, onto the second gripe.  With desktop apps (Silverlight 3, Air, WPF, Native etc) you have to install and configure them individually on different machines.  He’s right this is a pain and another example is when you blow away your machine and reinstall the OS.  After this you have to install all your apps and configure your settings to get back to the way you had it before.  This is time consuming.  I want to be doing other stuff instead!

This is where Live Mesh and Live Services (the underlying services for developers) comes to the rescue.  The premise behind Mesh is that people have data, applications, devices all over the place.  As the device explosion continues, keeping applications and data that people care about close to them is going to become increasingly difficult to do. 

Mesh makes that happen by providing applications that run online or offline, sync both user data and app settings between devices and the cloud, and leverage the local device’s horsepower to provide a rich user experience.

https://www.puertadeenlace.net/run09/

Oh and check out the Silverlight version of Windows 7 too…

We worked with Wygwam to build a cool tool for Visual Studio 2008 that allows you to tap into the Mesh and browse the data in your Live Framework apps.  Here’s what you can do with the Live Framework Explorer:

• Integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio 2008
• Read, Edit, Delete easily stored in the Mesh
• Upload/Download files into the Mesh
• Search for strings in the Mesh
• and more…

The Live Framework Explorer is a CodePlex project which you can download and also check out the source code for.  If you’ve got feedback or ideas for the Live Framework Explorer then let us know in the Codeplex!

Get it here: https://lfe.codeplex.com/

Watch Greg from Wygwam demo the Live Framework Explorer in his rock star Mix Session online (here) search for session MIX09-T76M!

What is the Live Framework? – see my video on Channel 9

Bit late to the press with this one, but that’s because I’ve been working on some way cool stuff for next week at Mix :-)

The Live Framework SDK and Tools April CTP has just been launched!  Not really sure why they launched mid-March and called it an April CTP – but hey, I’m not complaining when you get:

• All-in-one installer (like a multivitamin – lots of goodness in one capsule)
• Support for Win7 and IE8 (satisfies even the most demanding dogfooder)
• Side-by-side installation of Live Framework CTP and Live Mesh Beta (now be a consumer and dev – all at the same time!)
• Performance Improvements (we’re super slick, just like Win7)
• and more

For the full announcement check out the Live Framework Team Blog and get the download itself here:

DOWNLOAD THE TOOLS AND SDK
DOWNLOAD THE SDK ONLY

Above – Messenger then and now.

Since then, we’ve had many new versions culminating in the latest, a part of Windows Live Essentials and there have been some very cool features along the way.  It’s crazy to think we had voice call (voip) in 2000 (Skype wasn’t in beta until 2003) and then video calls followed in version 5 in 2002!

What’s perhaps more impressive is the back end infrastructure that Live Messenger runs on in the cloud.  With over 320 million users worldwide and being the world’s #1 free instant messaging service it means that you need some pretty hefty investments in the cloud to make this stuff run reliably, securely and at scale so that customers get the experiences they deserve.

One of the other cool things is we’ve opened up the platform to allow developers to build web experiences that use the service and bring instant messaging onto their websites using Live Messenger.  I’m talking of course about the Messenger Library and the IM controls which are client-side JavaScript libraries that connect to the Messenger Service allow for more engaging experiences.

One thing I’ve noticed when playing around with the Messenger Library and IM Controls are that whilst they are amazingly powerful tools I had to code my IM platform from the ground up.  Still, the end result was cool and it gave my website a completely new angle for attracting new users and keeping them on my site for longer.

LiveWIM, a site for tracking your whereabouts and letting your friends know, have gone and implemented and the results are pretty cool.  The thing I like, as well as the familiarity of the LiveWIM logo is that I get a list of remembered Live IDs so I don’t have to type in my credentials.  If I’ve actually asked Live ID to remember my password then I can just click the Live ID and it signs me in no hassle – also a cool feature.

Old Sign-in Experience

New Sign-in Experience

We’ve just launched the ability to customize the sign-in experience so that you can now achieve something that looks like this:

New Sign-in Experience Customization Areas

You can customize everything in orange:

The technical documentation is here:

• Overview on Customizing the Sign-in Experience 
  • Customizing the Sign-in page
  • Dynamic Sign-in Query String
  • Localizing the Sign-in Page
  • Sign-in Page Example
  • Sign-in Page XML Reference 

Old Registration Experience

New Registration Experience

You are now able to customize the registration experience in the following way:

• Thematically, by changing the fonts, colors, and images that appear on the registration pages.
• Contextually, by selecting a registration flow. A registration flow determines what information users must provide when creating a Windows Live ID, and how users are asked for that information.

Here is the documentation you need:

• Customizing the Registration Experience
  • Understanding Registration Flows
  • Associating a Registration Flow
  • Customizing a Registration Page
  • Registration Page Example
  • Registration Page XML Reference