While the most ideal scenario is to only run UCMA 3.0 applications with Lync Server 2010, for many of you this is simply not possible. You may own an application that was written for UCMA 2.0 and you want to upgrade to Lync Server 2010, but the application has not yet been updated to UCMA 3.0. Likewise...

One of the many new features in Lync Server 2010 is a change to how meeting Urls are formatted. The name of this feature is "Simple Url", but in truth this this elicits a smirk from anyone on our team who has dealt with them, as simple Urls are anything but simple. The goal of this blog will be to shed...

Today we will finally start delving into the topology document - well sort of. In the previous two days I covered the Content Management Server and how documents are defined. I also mentioned that the topology document itself is stored in the Content Management Store. Today I will cover what exactly...

In yesterday's post, I glossed over the small fact that pretty much every single line of manageability code has been rewritten in Lync Server 2010. In today's post, I thought it would be a good idea to explain this further. Almost every single line of manageability code was rewritten in Lync Server...

For those of you who haven't seen a blog from me in over a year, you may be happy to hear the following information. I am alive and well, with this post serving as evidence of the former. We have a new name for our product - Microsoft Lync Server 2010. Those who have followed our product...

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...

In truth, this is now a new blog. I'm not sure what we will be covering in the next several months, short of the already stated UCMA 2.0 APIs. However, there are some sharp differences between this blog and my old one. First, it already has a new look and feel. I would love to personalize the site...

At long last this blog is back up and running. Very soon (current goal is Wednesday), I will start a new series of UCMA blogs covering the new 2.0 API. My goal is to eventually cover all parts of this now huge set of APIs, but unlike my previous set of posts on UCMA there will be some changes. ...

OK, this may be old news to many of you out there, but the Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit just shipped. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet but you can be sure I will. I hope to receive a free copy of it at an internal event next month, at which time I also hope to sign up to contribute...

There are some product architectures created here at Microsoft that I am marvelled at with their simplicity, ease of use, and power. Unfortunately, I do not find WMI to be one of those architectures. With hope, some day we will have a sane replacement for WMI but in the meantime we still need to deal...

Working at Microsoft is really interesting in that I often see my work being used throughout the world. It was nice seeing the press about the Unified Communications launch, knowing that I helped participate. Executives here like to mention that we are changing the world and affecting people's daily...

In yesterday's post, I discussed how knowledge of where the WMI provider retrieves its data is important when querying it. Today I thought I would provide a list of the WMI classes and where the data comes from for each. If you perform a lot of WMI querying in OCS, this list may be helpful. Note that...

As many of you are likely aware, Office Communications Server (and previous versions) make use of WMI for storing various pieces of data. You can find details of the WMI classes that currently ship with OCS 2007 here . While this gives helpful information about what types of classes and properties are...

OK, so one of my new year's resolutions has been to finally keep this blog going. I thought I would start with a quick status blog and explain what I have in store for the near future. As much as I would love to blog about the cool new feature I am working on, I am unable to give much light on this...

Personally, I feel one area that we did not address overly well in Speech Server is allowing developers to test their speech applications. Granted, this seems to be missing from many platforms these days but I think in the case of speech applications this is especially important because they can be tricky...

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 I have received several e-mails asking for help and advice for building OCS applications. While I normally do try to take the time to answer these to the best of my ability, with coding speeding up and more deadlines to make it seems unlikely that I will have a lot of spare time in the next...

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...

Recently I answered an issue where a customer was confused because sometimes we use the Es-Mx locale for the Es-Us language pack. The reason we have to do this is Windows Server 2003 does not have an Es-Us locale. If you try to create such a locale, you will receive an exception. On Vista and Windows...