Feed: James.Random() - AggScore: 74.5

I'm moving home to a new blog at www.jamessenior.com!  This move also represents a rebrand for both myself and my content but more explained in my first post: Welcome from Microsoft's Social Web Guy!

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 Live Search team have just launched a cool competition in partnership with the Gnomedex conference where developers can win $10,000 and other cash prizes that have in impact on the economy or earth’s ecology. 

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! http://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:

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

Paisano writes a punchy post about the death of desktop apps that I commented on and I wanted to share a bit more insight into where we’re taking the concept of Mesh in order to solve some of the problems that he identified.

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.

Well their website for their IT Pro/Developer event is anyway! Check it out here!  Way retro! Nice work guys.

http://www.puertadeenlace.net/run09/

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

At PDC back in October we launched the Live Framework into CTP and with that we provided a cool tool called the Live Framework Resource Model Browser which you could use to explore the data that you stored in the Mesh.  The tool was good but limited.  It was difficult to navigate the data, find what you were looking for and also make changes to the data itself.  Furthermore, it was a separate tool so I had to jump out of Visual Studio to navigate the data in Mesh.

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: http://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!

Just announced this at Mix09. Here’s what you need to know.  Here’s where you need to go for more information: http://dev.live.com/messenger

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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

I was doing some background reading on Live Messenger today via Wikipedia and it said that the first version of messenger (then MSN Messenger) came out in 1999! wow that seems so long ago, and look how much has changed since then!

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.

I blogged last week about the new documentation available for customizing the registration and sigin-in pages for Live ID and we’re already starting to see some examples in the wild.

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.

One of the biggest bits of feedback from customers that use Live ID on their website is that the Live ID sign-in and registration experiences should be customizable so that instead of a Windows Live brand and look and feel, the user gets a look and feel consistent with your website so they aren’t confused as to why the brand has changed.

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

This year I’m in the privileged position of being involved in possibly the greatest conference the world has ever seen.  Yes, I’m talking about Mix09 – Microsoft’s annual web conference held at the Venetian in Las Vegas.  This year’s conference is being held 18-20th Match and promises to be a stunning affair with jar dropping keynotes, industry leading speakers and inspiring sessions all set amongst the best place to party! :-)

For your chance to win a free pass (worth $1400) to this year’s event all you have to do is:

Dream up a killer app that uses services from Live Services and/or Live Framework and record a one minute video of yourself presenting it via Soapbox or YouTube.

As part of your pass you get full access to the conference, food and drink and an invite to the hottest party on the strip at club TAO – oh yeah and drinks are on us :-)  All you need to do is get yourself there and pay hotel bills.

I’ll also showcase the top 3 killer apps right here on my blog.

Here are the steps you must follow to be considered:

• You imagine an application that uses Live Services and/or Live Framework
• Record a one minute video of yourself presenting the idea on a webcam
• Upload the video to Soapbox or YouTube
• Post the link to the video in the comments of this blog entry
• The application must be original or extend an already existing app
• Submission deadline: February 23rd, 23:00 pm PST

On February 24th, I will review the entries and choose the best one. My criteria will be:

• Originality – can be based on a couple of things
  • Have you got a really novel new idea
  • Have you extended an existing app in an interesting way
• Entertaining/funny
• Presentation style
• That’s it :)

So where to start?  How about what Live Services are available?  Here are some of them:

• Contacts – get your Live address book into your app, lookup your buddies
• Virtual Earth – map your stuff in your app
• Messenger – add instant messaging in your app
• Mesh – sync and share your data across multiple devices and work offline
• Live Search – bring back search results into your app
• Photos – use photos from your Windows Live Spaces

Inspire yourself with the Windows Live Quick Apps.

Here are some links I’ve put together to get you on your way

• Developer portal for Live Services
• Developer portal for Live Framework

The Live Framework Architecture

I’ve been meaning to say happy birthday to the Apple Mac for the past few weeks and finally got round to it.  Apple were a part of my life from an early age (my dad worked in the UK office) and as kids growing up we got our grubby paws on all sorts of cool technology.  Looking back at the timeline of the Macintosh I can remember playing with the Mac Lisa all the way up to 6100, 6200 and everything in between.  That’s almost 10 years of hardware right there.

In the above picture I’m playing Pinball with my sister on the Apple IIe (I think).  She was never destined to be a geek (you can tell because she’s eating the controller). 

My colleague Brian Keller kindly added a Live Mesh orb into the picture suggesting that I was actually using an early Mesh CTP prototype.  I can neither confirm or deny those rumors :)

Couldn’t make it to the Live Services Jumpstart training earlier this year?  Don’t fret, we’ve just published the recordings from these sessions on the Live Services Developer Portal.

Go download, learn, enjoy and create wonderful things:

http://dev.live.com/training

About bloody time. Hooray!  Microsoft are going to do retail stores.  I think every Microsoft employee has at one time thought about starting one of these up, I know I did!

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/feb09/02-12CVPRetailStoresPR.mspx