David Treadwell in his news and updates on the Live Platform Services, announced that Microsoft is unifying its developer platform protocols for services on the open, standards-based Atom format (RFC 4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023). Adopting the standardized Atom Publishing Protocol is in line with Microsoft's new interoperability principles.
The Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub or APP) is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources. AtomPub builds on top of the Atom Syndication Format, an formalizes many of the mechanisms required for the exchange of rich and meaningful content via a process known as Representational State Transfer - REST.
There are new Live services with AtomPub endpoints which enable any HTTP-aware application to easily consume Atom feeds of photos and for unstructured application storage. You can also use any Atom-aware public tools or libraries, such as .NET WCF Syndication to read or write these cloud service-based feeds.
AtomPub will also be supported in ADO.NET Data Services ("Project Astoria"). See Pablo Castro's post about APP support in Astoria.
Therefore, it's important to understand the fundamentals of Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) if you want to leverage services offered by Microsoft on the Web. Many Web 2.0 sites as well, now implement AtomPub.
What is AtomPub?
An application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources using HTTP and XML.
The AtomPub Model
AtomPub operates on collections of Web resources. All collections and their resources support the same basic interactions. The interactions are based on the common HTTP verbs.
What can be done with AtomPub?
Learn more about the Atom Publishing Protocol here
People can use their Windows Live contact information with your site, while keeping complete control of their data. This includes Hotmail, Messenger, and Mobile contacts.
You can build Social Networks using:
This is an HTTP-based service that enables developers to programmatically submit queries to, and retrieve results from, the Windows Live Contacts Address Book database service.
Windows Live Contacts API provides :
The owner of the data controls each view and set of abilities.
The Windows Live Contacts Web service is exposed to clients in a HTTP/GET request interface with XML response.
Try out the Interactive SDKTry out the Contacts Control (Beta)
About the Windows Live Contacts API
Contacts Control Mashups samples:
When you query the service, you first choose the scope over which you wish to query, and then you provide a query expression to filter the flexible entities in the scope. The syntax that begins the query operation is (?q=). For example, to query for entities, specify a container scope, followed by the query expression:
https://{authority}.data.beta.mssds.com/v1/{container}?q={query}
You cannot retrieve entity objects today by searching at the authority level, the widest scope for any entity search is the Container. There is no cross-container search (in the current implementation).
However, if you want to query for container metadata, specify an authority scope, followed by the query expression:
https://<authority_id>.data.beta.mssds.com/v1/?q={query}
The Query Language
The LINQ-like syntax of the query language that is supported in this release is as follows:
The query iterates over the set of flexible entities in the specified scope and returns only those items that satisfy the specified condition in the optional where clause. In the where clause, you can specify a simple condition or a compound condition (multiple conditions combined by using logical operators).
The syntax allows you to distinguish between querying metadata (system) properties and querying flexible properties (anything you added). When you query metadata properties, you use the '.' notation. In the following query, the condition in the where clause references the Id metadata property. The query retrieves a Flexible Entity with a specific Id value.
from e in entities where e.Id == "someId" select e
The flexible properties are stored in the Properties collection of the entity. When you query over these properties, you specify the property name by using Indexer syntax. The following query retrieves all entities whose Age flexible property value is 32:
There are four new Quick Applications - Retail, Team Builder, Field Manager, and Contoso Riders - all of which offer community-based Web sites integrating Windows Live services. Quick Applications are fully customizable and developed around specific Web scenarios. Quick Apps are typically developed by Microsoft Partners or customers, and occasionally in-house.
The source code has been released to Codeplex, which means anyone can download, modify, and resell the code (see MS-PL License for all the details).
What are Quick Applications used for? Angus Logan writes in his blog that
The Quick Apps have 3 purposes Examples of what is possible – use them, play with them, get ideas! Technical reference – if you want to use a Live Platform API, there is a good chance it will be in a Quick App, check out the code to see how it was implemented. Starting point – these end-to-end applications are licensed under a fairly liberal (OSI approved) license, you can use them as starting points for your own applications.
The Quick Apps have 3 purposes
Get the Quick Applications
Retail (demo) Develop an e-commerce site that uses videos to display products.
Team Builder (demo) Develop a community around a group or team. Add photos, upload videos, and start conversations with other members.
Field Manager (demo) Manage fields and leagues for sporting events. Create leagues, see up-to-date weather conditions for fields, add and view notes about field conditions.
Contoso Riders (demo) Allows members to create bike rides and events. Share photos, add interactive maps, chat with other riders, and upload videos.
Finally, the CTP release of the new Virtual Earth ASP.NET control is available.
ASP.NET developers can now integrate Microsoft Virtual Earth Maps simply by dragging and dropping an ASP.NET Server Control in Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer. No JavaScript programming is required. This control can be combined with ASP.NET AJAX capabilities to provide ASP.NET Serverside processing without the need of coding in JavaScript.
The Map control is available right in your toolbox of Visual Studio
You can drag and drop the control from toolbox onto your web page and set some properties and you are ready to go.
Server side events for panning/zooming, find/directions are available in addition to client side events for the map control.
You can control how map displays on your web page with standard functionality like MapMode (2D/3D), MapStyle(Road/Aerial), displaying dashboard and setting its size, setting the zoom levels, zooming in/out, panning etc.
You can add shapes to map from ASP.NET Server Side using provided methods. You can query different shapes/layers in the Map and delete them as well.
Downloads
The suite of tools is currently a community technology preview, we strongly discourage any web site from going live using these controls.
This CTP release only targets English (United States).
Requirements
Operating System
Development Tools
I want to highlight the availability of the Windows Live™ Tools for Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008, currently in the Community Technical Preview stage.
This set of control add-ins enable .NET developers to easily integrate Windows Live services into their Web applications, using Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008.
The six controls included in this CTP release are:
Requirements for Using Windows Live Tools
SSDS offers a simple, easy-to-understand data model. This post is an overview in order to get strated quickly. To learn more go to SQL Server Data Services Primer on MSDN.
The SSDS data model is a three-level containment model that includes authorities, containers and entities.
Depending on your application needs, you container can be a homogeneous or heterogeneous.
In SQL Server Data Services, the flexible entity is a key concept.
NOTE In the current implementation, there are limits to using the user-defined and metadata properties.
Service Interface: SSDS supports both the SOAP and REST interfaces.
The URI Space: there are four kinds of URIs that you will work with if you are using the REST head.
Examples:
https://data.beta.mssds.com/v1/
https://<authority_id>.data.beta.mssds.com/v1/
https://<authority_id>.data.beta.mssds.com/v1/<container_id>
The container URI fetches a single entity that conatins container metadata
https://<authority_id>.data.beta.mssds.com/v1/<container_id>/<entity_id>
A sample book entity is shown below:
<UsedBookKind xmlns:s="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sitka/2008/03/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:x="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <s:Id>MySampleBook</s:Id> <s:Version>1</s:Version> <Title xsi:type="x:string">My Book</Title> <ISBN xsi:type="x:string">1-57880-066-36</ISBN> <Author xsi:type="x:string">Mr. Author</Author> <Publisher xsi:type="x:string">Mr. Publisher</Publisher> <InPrint xsi:type="x:boolean">false</InPrint> <NumberOfCopiesSold xsi:type="x:decimal">250</NumberOfCopiesSold> <PublicationDate xsi:type="x:dateTime">2004-01-27T00:00:00</PublicationDate> <CoverPhoto xsi:type="x:base64Binary">AQID</CoverPhoto> </UsedBookKind>