The geek boys and geek girls in the Messenger/Contacts engineering have created their own blog which is all messenger development, all of the time.
It's only a couple of hours old, so there is only 1 post - but they assure me this is the place to go for Messenger Development (I've also heard from Steve about the back log of posts he's got) :)
Earlier I mentioned Jason Kelly's blog which is also dedicated to MessengerDev too - I see a blog fight happening sometime ... who will have the best content on Messenger Development?
I don't really care - because all of it will be interesting!
I was working all night - last night - literally - haven't slept yet - this morning I got a little silly and took a photo with my eye.fi card, it got automatically uploaded to spaces and downloaded to my photo frame in my office.
Notice the use of australian berocca to perk me up - you can't buy berocca in the US.
and check out the blood shot eyes.
I've posted some of the decks Jason Kelly and I have been working on (not fully baked but should be useful):
More to come in the very near future.
ps. I posted them in PPTX/PPT/XPS/PDF - let me know if I missed your favorite format.
The Windows Live Platform Quick Applications demo sites are making real progress. Between the 5.0 release and the 6.0 release we closed a lot of work items and added some great features – all in 178 work items!
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Tafiti Search visualization has had a major addition. Using the Windows Live Messenger Library and Script# we turned Tafiti from being a slick search UI to being a social search application. You can now perform searches, save your results and share that experience with your Windows Live Messenger friends. Research has never been so fun! try it | watch it | get it | coming soon business value video interview
Visit Planner (new Quick App) which is fictitious hotel providing a differentiated experience for their customers. Contoso Hotel guests can use this online concierge to plan their trip to multiple cities. The application consists of a Silverlight 1.1 canvas which integrates with Microsoft Virtual Earth, Windows Live Messenger, Live Search and the Windows Live Contacts control - try it | watch it | get it | coming soon business value video interview
Adventure Works Resorts has also had some renovations done – the Windows Live Photo API CTP is being used to provide its members with the ability to import photos from Windows Live Spaces and two-way sync . We use LiveNet for the development and in the near future we will integrate the Photo API CTP refresh.
We teamed up with the Windows Live team from China to fully localize Contoso ISV into Chinese – you can go to any page and see all the text in Chinese – not only text on the web site but the Windows Live controls are also localized automatically. There are instructions on how to setup your browser in the wiki.
Video.Show hit RTW along with a lot of documentation (check out its development site) so we can included it in this release (plus its a way cool site)
Contoso Bicycle Club - no major changes, however our friends in Canada are developing a very interesting spin off site.
Contoso University – no major enhancements
I do a lot of PowerPoint... way too much.
I can manipulate images well before the hit PowerPoint but as soon as you drop them in sometimes the template colors conflict etc. (you may not notice the first template you use but if you reuse slides on many templates you'll find yourself in a world of pain).
if you take the image and make it transparent in
Say I make a screen shot and transparent it out in Paint.net when you paste it you lose transparency;
so you need to make PowerPoint think the image is transparent.
below are instructions
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then I want to drop it into PowerPoint on say a green background (i copy and paste)
You see that little piece of white funkiness?
Well what I do to get sexy slides is:
Use the wand to select the transparent area;
then fill the transparent area with some color I'm which isn't presence in the screenshot (like purple)
then paste the entire image into PowerPoint (purple bits and all);
select the image you want to modify and select "drawing" top the sub context menu in the ribbon
.
you can then select the recolor menu on the left hand side and select "set transparent"
then click the NEON color you selected (purple in my case)
the image on the right looks much more professional that the one on the left.
I hate seeing code/xml/ any type of markup without highlighting - its nasty and if I wanted to notepad I would.
Unfortunately, copying and pasting straight from Visual Studio into PowerPoint doesn't presence all the formatting.
Well here is the procedure to get it to work (at least for *.aspx files):
You end up with great slides like this (which happen to be disclosing stuff too):
NOTE: Vikas (PM of Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio) doesn't know I blogged about his new feature, so don't tell him.
I was just trying to get my l33t coding skillz on prepping a MIX08 demo and I needed to do some drag and drop stuff;
whilst hacking around the web at code from 1999 which drags layers i hit Sahil (MVP rockstar I sharepoint work with - and went to Bulgaria with!);
He hooked me up wit the answer straight away - rockstar!
http://www.asp.net/AJAX/AjaxControlToolkit/Samples/DragPanel/DragPanel.aspx
Ed Kaim (Sharplogic) and his team are gurus on the WL Platform... they have built lots of great stuff for us.
He guest hosted the This Week on Channel 9.
I wish this was filmed a week later as he could have talked about all the secret stuff he's done for our team.
Script# is a little hint :)
Watch it here.
Should be available in the near future - Inder Sethi - the dev manager for our social store (live contacts / messenger server) talks about why DataPortability is important to him.