Greetings Developers and Partners of Windows Live Agents, We are very pleased to announce that WLA 5.1 is here! It is with a heavy heart that we have to announce WLA 5.1 is the last WLA release. We are retiring our product and this final...

Windows Live Agents SDK offers the ability to self host your agent for development and testing purposes. Limited number of license sessions is granted per service (common-service, MSN, etc) per month. License session limits are imposed per license certificate;...

As an Agents developer, you need to be able to handle and present data accurately and efficiently. There are many string parsing, manipulation, and examination functions in the Buddyscript arsenal. Many are of the standard variety that are found in most...

Today we're going to talk again about debugging your agent's inner workings, but this time through the use of debug output instead of the step-by-step debugger. This is generally where you want to go to check up on what's happening behind the scene if...

Hello, We are starting to plan our 5.2 Windows Live Agents SDK release. Even though we have many ideas and directions that we can take the SDK, we would love to hear what kind of improvements and features you would like to see! Please email your...

Windows Live Messenger translation bot now available! The Microsoft Translator team is excited to announce the new translation bot for Windows Live Messenger! This Messenger bot does translations for you. Just add mtbot@hotmail.com to your contacts...

Greetings, We are pleased to announce that a new version of WLA SDK is now available for download. Please use http://agents.live.com/ to download SDK. Thank you, Windows Live Agents team

Depending on the complexity of your Agent, you might want to add debug code right of the bat. That makes it easier (and less painful) to find issues you will come across. Look for examples further down the post. How to debug your Agent: Syntax...

In 5.0, we introduced a new set of features collectively called Runtime Policy Compliance . We designed Compliance to help developers comply with security policies that address potentially offensive input and output in an agent. You can get a more detailed...

When your agent launches, you will be given access to the Knowledge Management Server, which includes a Usage Reporting section. The URL is https://YourProjectName.console.agents.live.com. When you navigate to the Usage Reporting site, you will...

If you are moving from the old Colloquis IDE to the Visual Studio-based Windows Live Agents SDK, and you've never used Visual Studio, you may be a little lost. This post aims to collect simple hints and tricks for agent developers new to working with...

This is a continuation on An Advanced Look at Web Services and DataSources. The original entry is located here: http://windowsliveagents.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!5BCD45E519E07634!711.entry Now let’s take a look at the datasource itself. The datasource...

An advanced look at Web Services and Datasources Back in February, we showed a basic example of accessing a web service and using a datasource to consume information from a web service. (Refer to: http://windowsliveagents.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!5BCD45E519E07634...

As compared to Web sites and traditional software applications, conversational agents are subject to some unique policy compliance risks. These risks arise because: · End users’ interactions with agents are freeform and unpredictable. · Agents...

Hi again! Here is the second part of our visit to the magical world of contexts. Yesterday we brushed on a few simple uses for them, now let's dive into a slightly more sensitive subject. Once the agent is hosted and public, you may want to block...

Today we're going to talk a bit about contexts and what wonderful things you can do with them. Well, maybe not "Wall-E opening sequence" wonderful, but they sure come in handy to control what your agent is doing in an easy and trouble-free way. With...

Hello Developers and Partners of Windows Live Agents, We are very excited that 5.0 is here! We have received many questions from all of you regarding the transition from 4.3 to 5.0. Windows Live Agents Partner Support is no longer accepting projects...

Greetings, We often design dialogs in BuddyScript to answer to user queries in a specific context. We will see today how by using actions, we can have initiate and notify to answer dialogs, and what can be the use. A dialog is a set of dialog...

Quite often we hear from partners who complain that the screen name, personal status message, or display picture of their agent has disappeared from the Messenger client, and ask us to fix it. Strictly speaking, the display of these parameters in the...

Today’s post will cover the ability to preserve conversations when sending notifications. The typical scenario we are trying to avoid is: a user is answering a series of troubleshooting questions, and then receives a stock alert. The alert proposes to...

Good (morning|afternoon|evening), With the initiate functionality, you can choose to put one of two restrictions based on the targeted user: · The user has to be known to the agent · The user has to actually be conversing with the agent This...

Hello fellow agent developers, I am going to present, in this post and the next 3 ones, the notion of conversations in BuddyScript and the way to best use them with the “initiate” and “notify” functionalities. Here are the items I am going to...

Hello Developers and Partners of Windows Live Agents, We are pleased to announce the public release of our new SDK for Visual Studio. We have been in limited beta of the Colloquis SDK for quite some time and are excited to release this new technology...

Definition of Reporting Terms in Usage Reporting When your agent launches, you will be given access to the Knowledge Management Server, which includes a Usage Reporting section. The URL is https://YourProjectName.console.agents.live.com. When...

The standard reporting suite on the Knowledge Management Console covers the most important metrics -- Unique Users, Total Sessions, etc. However, you'll often want (or be asked) to provide additional reports based on the special needs of the customer...