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...

Subpatterns are much like functions in that they can be used as filters for data -- one value is passed in, evaluated, and another possibly different value is returned. That's why we can do things like this: subpattern Basketball + (basketball...

Hi All, I know a lot of folks have been waiting diligently for the new version of the SDK. We have finished the product and are in the midst of deploying the platform in our data center now. Once we get the final approval from Operations, we'll...

Hello Developers, As we are nearing the public release of our new Visual Studio SDK and Partner on-boarding system, we wanted to make sure that we expose our developers to all the benefits from Microsoft in terms of certifications. We realize there...

Audits are an important piece to the ongoing maintenance of your agent. The purpose of auditing is to take a look at how users are interacting with the agent, and identify ways to improve the experience. Any issues that you uncover in audits should be...

So, you think you know everything about Buddyscript? Well, let’s see how much of such a statement is true. Try to answer this short quiz! If you score all of them it doesn’t mean you are an expert, but you could say you are getting there ;-) ...

Ideally you start creating a new Agent using the WLATemplate! Detailed information on how to instantiate a new project [currently available languages are: English, Chinese (simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish] from the WLATemplate...