More than a few blog posts ago I stated my intent to publish a series of articles on cross-domain communication techniques. More time has passed than I had intended, but at last here is the start of that series of articles. The series will explore progressively more advanced cross-domain techniques as...

MSN just launched The Podium '08 as part of their 2008 US Presidential election coverage. The Podium '08 brings together data on presidential candidates for voters and election followers to explore by topic and compare candidates head to head on specific issues. What's interesting about The Podium is...

Windows Live SkyDrive (formerly known as Folders) is now in beta, enabling end users to store arbitrary data on the web under password access control. Files can be accessed over http(s) from web pages and from stand-alone client applications (thanks to the http file handler add-on in XPSP2). Files can...

Another month, another release! This month we've added incremental search to the contacts and presence controls to make it easier to find a particular contact in your haystack of hundreds of family, friends, and coworkers. Just type in a few letters of the name or word you're looking for, and the control...

The Windows Live Web Controls now support custom colors! The Windows Live Contacts web control and Windows Live Spaces web control now accept additional parameters to specify the text and background colors of the inner and outer regions of the controls so that you can "skin" the controls to more naturally...

The June issue (Journal 12) of The Architecture Journal focuses on web architecture. I was delighted to be invited to contribute, and wrote "Secure Cross-Domain Communication in the Browser" for this issue. In the article I describe a somewhat bizarre technique we use in the Windows Live Contacts web...

Our little web controls are growing up so fast! We've migrated the Windows Live Contacts web control and Windows Live Spaces web control to new servers in the Microsoft datacenters and a new domain name: controls.services.live.com . The web controls will continue to work on the old domain name (dev...

When people ask what I worked on at Google and I answer "undisclosed browser technology", I think some folks think I'm just being coy or obnoxious. The truth is, I'm required to say that publicly and privately until Google publicly announces the technology or its derivatives. Well, that day has finally...

Last week Kevin Ledley, keeper of the dev.live.com content, asked me for a bit of help to get a Silverlight video player working. He wanted to "borrow" the cool scrolling video list and video player from our sister site, msdn2.microsoft.com and set it up on our dev.live.com homepage to show Windows Live...

Torontonian " wavesmash " has been tinkering with getting a Silverlight app up and running on his Blogger blog. Silverlight Streaming got him most of the way there, but he found the recommended pattern of placing the Silverlight control construction in a separate createSilverlight.js file became a show...

A few posts ago I promised to elaborate on a little gotcha that bit us in the butt while prepping the "blocks" to enable Popfly apps to use the Windows Live Contacts web control and Windows Live Spaces web control . Here it is: IE has a handy document.namespaces object that reflects the namespaces defined...

Delay started out poking around in the XPS document format. Before he could stop himself, he had an XPS document reader implemented in Silverlight !

Scott Isaacs shares some additional "best practices" points on dealing with popup windows and popup blockers: Always program window.open() very defensively... Always try catch any calls to window.open() and if you are retaining a reference to the window (e.g., var w = window.open(…)), always make sure...

Today John Montgomery 's NPT team launched Microsoft Popfly , a web-based development environment for building web applications with little or no code. John shares some background and history on his blog , but what you really ought to see first is the Popfly video on the Overview page. Seeing is believing...

Tim Heuer laments the growing number of otherwise reputable web sites that instruct their flocks to disable popup blockers in order to complete some task within that web site. Having stumbled into popup blocker hell myself only a few months ago with the Windows Live Contacts Control I can certainly attest...

I've been tinkering with Silverlight and Silverlight Streaming and thought I'd share some of my discoveries and pointers. Silverlight is designed to dovetail into a traditional HTML+JavaScript web app. Your web page loads a Silverlight.js file and constructs a Silverlight object. What happens after...

If you set out to install the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha SDK and installed all the additional recommended (but not required) bits such as Visual Studio Orcas and ASP.NET Future , you won't see this problem so you can stop reading now. If you're a minimalist like me and install only the bare minimum Silverlight...

Martin Heller posted an article on Infoworld, " Data Wants To Be Free ," about the Windows Live Data "secret session" at MIX07. The Windows Live Data service (probably not its final name) enables a deeper level of integration and data access than the devlive web controls, but still maintains user control...

Silverlight implements isolated local storage on the client. Currently in the Alpha, the storage is limited to 1MB per web application and is keyed to the full URL of the XAML/HTML page. That means for this alpha release, two pages that are part of the same application served from the same domain will...

Josh Holmes has a great summary of the Ray Ozzie / Scott Guthrie keynote yesterday. Towards the end of his post, Josh notes with shock & awe that Silverlight not only includes a .NET CLR execution environment, but also the Dynamic Language Runtime as well. Yes, it's true! You can write apps for Silverlight...

I'm pleased to announce the availability of a new client-side web control for accessing Windows Live services: The Windows Live Spaces control ! This control enables web visitors to use photos stored in their Windows Live Spaces photo albums with third party web applications. It's a "photo picker" -...

I was installing a new label printer at home a little while ago and noticed mention of a developer SDK in the readme docs. (Yes, some people actually read the readme) I know from experience that getting text to land right side up on a target as small as an address label can be a pain in the neck using...

LiveInABox is a collection of sample projects that show how to use the many Windows Live Services in your own web apps. It's a 4MB MSI that sets up the sample web apps to run on your localhost IIS server, so you can modify and experiment with them on your local machine. You'll still need to be online...

The Visual Studio team has just launched the Beginner Developer Learning Center , an instructional resource to help budding developers get started in programming. The curriculum is divided into two tracks - web development and Windows development, and three tiers of experience. Cool. Now maybe I can...

Here's a headline that'll grab ya: Are you interested in being part of a select group that is invited to help beta test a new service that lets PC game players connect with their friends on the Xbox through the LIVE gaming network? If you are, please read on. The beta signup form is here: https://connect...