We are almost at the point where our Powershell commandlet will be useful, but first we need to learn about establishing the session protocol. You see, SIP stands for “Session Initiation Protocol”. The key here is the word “Initiation”. Yup, SIP just manages telling so and so that so and so wants to...

In our next iteration, we will add to our commandlet to create a signaling session. In essence we will send an INVITE to the other party so that we can send a message later. There are a number of steps involved in setting up a session but for now we will just send the INVITE. When running this sample...

It’s about time that we began writing some code and getting into the details of the API. To start out, I will cover the signaling part of UCMA. Those of you who read my previous blog series on UCMA will find the next several posts very familiar. For some of you, learning the signaling APIs in UCMA...

Today, we will get started with coding UCMA applications. First though, I would like to cover again the Signaling namespace exposed by UCMA. While much of this is not necessary when using the new Collaboration namespace, I feel that it is still important in terms of understanding how the API and SIP...

Before you really start coding in UCMA 2.0, or even UCMA 1.0, it is extremely important that you understand the asynchronous pattern. UCMA is designed for server applications, meaning it supports many operations occurring at the same time. In order to best manage this, it uses an asynchronous model....

Let’s be honest, UCMA 1.0, while very useful, was a bit lame. The frustrating thing about it was it opened up many new possibilities, but didn’t give you the chance to take advantage of them. You could send messages to another party, but could not determine that user’s presence. You also were very limited...

There are several golden rules that I have learned over the last week while spending some time PInvoking Win32 functions from C#. 1) The content at PInvoke.net can often not be trusted. 2) The overwhelming precentage of articles on the net explaining how to PInvoke certain methods can also not...

Today I will venture outside the safe confines of Office Communications Server and discuss some quirks I have noticed with Windows services. ( Disclaimer: I am not in the Windows org so these are just my observations after some experimentation) Some of you may be aware that in the services control panel...

UCMA has finally shipped! For those of you who would like to download it, the full download is at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b30306e4-7dc1-44d2-9a68-9b4a6fc5c2df If you would like to see a webcast about UCMA, see the following. http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI...

I just received an e-mail that the Unified Communications Client API has just shipped and is now available externally at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=82c468da-3294-4ca9-bbcc-d455cfd06af2&displaylang=en This API has two acronyms - UCCA and UCCP. I have been calling...

Recently a customer contacted me with a question about creating multilingual applications with Speech Server. He had an application that ran in English and US Spanish and noticed that, while changing the synthesizer would switch TTS between languages, it had no effect on the prompt database used. ...

Every once in awhile (though somewhat more commonly now) I receive an e-mail or IM asking a question on the UCMA API. I decided to post the answers to some of the most common questions. Where can I download UCMA? - The release candidate is at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID...

I have a sneaking suspicion that many of you who use UCMA do not truly know when one should use SipPeerToPeerEndpoint vs SipEndpoint and when one should use RealTimeClientConnectionManager vs one of the RealTimeServerConnectionManagers. In this post I will try to clear up some of the confusion here....

In a recent post, I presented an overview of all of the different APIs available in Office Communications Server 2007. The goal of that post was to help direct developers who want to know where to start. From that post I received some feedback that this proves that OCS 2007 development is only for advanced...

Over time I have discussed all of the different APIs available to you in order to create Office Communications Server 2007 APIs. Today I thought I would do an overview of what's available and when you would use each one. Office Communicator API Example: Microsoft Office uses the Communicator...