Over at dev.live.com you can signup to an alert which will send the latest news sent to you using the Windows Live Alerts infrastructure.
I also added this to the CodePlex project for the Windows Live Quick Apps (signup here).
It was easy to set this up - all you need is an RSS feed and it takes about 2 minutes then you get some HTML to paste back on your site.
I was about to jump on stage @ an internal airlift and all my JavaScript syntax highlighting was busted (of course I had installed VS 2008 Beta 2 the night before). I shot an email out to our distribution lists and I got a response within an hour (on a Saturday morning) with the fix:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\CLSID\{014E9A41-54E5-44ED-B15E-EFFA8758BFFC}] "CodeBase"=file:///C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\\Common7\\IDE\\Microsoft.JScript.AuthoringServices.dll and [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\CLSID\{014E9A41-54E5-44ED-B15E-EFFA8758BFFC}\InprocServer32\9.0.0.0] "CodeBase"=file:///C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\\Common7\\IDE\\Microsoft.JScript.AuthoringServices.dll
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\CLSID\{014E9A41-54E5-44ED-B15E-EFFA8758BFFC}]
"CodeBase"=file:///C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\\Common7\\IDE\\Microsoft.JScript.AuthoringServices.dll
and
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\CLSID\{014E9A41-54E5-44ED-B15E-EFFA8758BFFC}\InprocServer32\9.0.0.0]
Broken
Fixed
Martin Parry (MS UK Evangelist) wrote a killer article on Windows Live Data. The area he focused on was the Contacts API.
In Hotmail/Messenger/Spaces the address book has been unified. Now we have such a rich address book(s) (500 million) with lots of contacts (and 30 billion relationships) that data wants to be free.
Basically the way it works is:
To see the working and to dig deeper see www.randomthirdparty.com (dev's shouldn't name domains). This is a public website which is similar to an interactive SDK
Check out Martin's article or the SDK or an implementation for Contoso University or cruise over to dev.live.com to see what other services there are.
Demo: browse here (click top left: London River Thames, Bike Cam)
Rob Blackwell wrote a how to up in the Codeplex discussion forum:
Neil rode around London with a video camera mounted on his bike - he also carried a Garmin GPS. We took the track log from the GPS and uploaded it to the PC using EasyGPS . This gave us a file in GPX format (XML Based). We then wrote some code that transformed the GPX file into a Expression Media Encoder Project file (also XML format). Each of the track points became a keyframe in the video with a title in the format GPS,<lat>, <lon>. We knew exactly what time the video started, so we could calculate key frame offsets by looking at the time stamp for each GPS position. We then ran the video through Expression Media Encoder and uploaded it to the Silverlight Streaming Service. Then, using a Silverlight video player we hooked the onMarkerReached events and, using a simple JavaScript handler, we update the Virtual Earth map whenever a key frame is reached. The code is pretty simple - take a look at function onMarkerReached in default.aspx.js Let me know if you use this technique to do something cool in your own app. Rob.--Rob BlackwellR&D DirectorActive Web Solutions Ltdhttp://www.aws.nethttp://www.robblackwell.org.ukMicrosoft MVP, Windows - Virtual Earth/MapPoint
Neil rode around London with a video camera mounted on his bike - he also carried a Garmin GPS.
We took the track log from the GPS and uploaded it to the PC using EasyGPS . This gave us a file in GPX format (XML Based).
We then wrote some code that transformed the GPX file into a Expression Media Encoder Project file (also XML format). Each of the track points became a keyframe in the video with a title in the format GPS,<lat>, <lon>. We knew exactly what time the video started, so we could calculate key frame offsets by looking at the time stamp for each GPS position.
We then ran the video through Expression Media Encoder and uploaded it to the Silverlight Streaming Service.
Then, using a Silverlight video player we hooked the onMarkerReached events and, using a simple JavaScript handler, we update the Virtual Earth map whenever a key frame is reached.
The code is pretty simple - take a look at function onMarkerReached in default.aspx.js
Let me know if you use this technique to do something cool in your own app.
Rob.--Rob BlackwellR&D DirectorActive Web Solutions Ltdhttp://www.aws.nethttp://www.robblackwell.org.ukMicrosoft MVP, Windows - Virtual Earth/MapPoint
The Windows Live Platform Quick Applications are pre-built vertical scenarios (shared source (under MS-PL)) which showcase areas of the Windows Live Platform. You can download the code, rehash, remix, rebuild, resell, use as a starter kit or implement as is... or just use it for some good geek fun.
Below are 2 of the existing Windows Live Quick Applications and 1 which will be coming out soon.
Membership Organizations (Contoso Bicycle Club) (code) Education (Contoso University) (code) This demo uses quite a few cool things, but the underlying guts of it the Contacts API where if you are a student of Contoso University you can delegate permissions for this web site to access your Windows Live Address Book (Hotmail / Live Messenger / Spaces friends). You can list all your friends and their location can be plotted on a map - try it. Coming Soon - Customer Acquisition / Professional Services (Contoso ISV)... This is the demo our team delivered for Steve Ballmer's keynote @ Worldwide Partner Conference in front of 10,000+ Microsoft partners. The scenario is a Microsoft Partner's website tricked out with lots of great stuff, customer's can come to the site, view the videos, blog entries, presence of the authors and then start a conversation with a sales representative. The sales representative can schedule the sales call without leaving Windows Live Messenger. Technology: Silverlight + Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live Web Instant Messaging (coming soon... Keiji presented it @ MIX (34 minutes in)) Windows Live Messenger Windows Live Messenger Activities Virtual Earth Windows Live Alerts
This demo uses quite a few cool things, but the underlying guts of it the Contacts API where if you are a student of Contoso University you can delegate permissions for this web site to access your Windows Live Address Book (Hotmail / Live Messenger / Spaces friends). You can list all your friends and their location can be plotted on a map - try it.
This is the demo our team delivered for Steve Ballmer's keynote @ Worldwide Partner Conference in front of 10,000+ Microsoft partners. The scenario is a Microsoft Partner's website tricked out with lots of great stuff, customer's can come to the site, view the videos, blog entries, presence of the authors and then start a conversation with a sales representative. The sales representative can schedule the sales call without leaving Windows Live Messenger.
Technology:
The Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver was lots of fun, and my demo (with some help) was presented in Steve Ballmer's Keynote.
If you are a partner looking for all the information on Windows Live there are a few places you should go:
Partner.Live.Com
The Windows Live platform of Web services provides a platform that lets your customer share information and content to create vibrant online communities and social networking spaces. This will enable partners to extend their existing applications using global, industry-leading Web services or build new Web applications that leverage Microsoft core infrastructure and Web services platform.
The central focus of this powerful new platform is built around four simple ideas:
All resting on a simple and transparent Terms of Use and flexible economic model.
Innovate On Windows Live (and its big brother: Innovate On) covers a lot of different technologies.
dev.live.com - everything you need to know from a technical point of view.
Lastly - the Windows Live Quick Applications - Beta -
Windows Live Web services are an ideal platform for developers. They offer a deep level of control with access to core services and data through open application programming interfaces (APIs). all of the code has been shared-source up on Codeplex. we have 2 released right now and there are more in the pipe. Contoso University (code on Codeplex)- an education scenario using Expo, Contacts API, Virtual Earth, Spaces, Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live. Contoso Bicycle Club (code on Codeplex) - a memebership organisation scenario which does some very cool mapping stuff (geo tagging video up in Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live and sync'ing the map)
Windows Live Web services are an ideal platform for developers. They offer a deep level of control with access to core services and data through open application programming interfaces (APIs). all of the code has been shared-source up on Codeplex.
we have 2 released right now and there are more in the pipe.
Contoso University (code on Codeplex)- an education scenario using Expo, Contacts API, Virtual Earth, Spaces, Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live.
Contoso Bicycle Club (code on Codeplex) - a memebership organisation scenario which does some very cool mapping stuff (geo tagging video up in Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live and sync'ing the map)
The live.ca team have created a killer ad up on Soabox watch it here