At the World Partner Conference in Denver today, they took a look at Windows Live and the opportunities that are there for companies to take advantage of the services that are offered by Windows Live. They showed off two applications that had been built by two UK Microsoft Partners, AWS and Conchango. The apps themselves have been built using technologies like Silverlight (in particular the streaming service) and Virtual Earth (Live Local's engine), and they basically show off how Windows Live services can be used for things like clubs and organisations, and even in the education sector.
What's even better about both of these demos, is not only how cool they are to use, but the entire source code for them is publicly available on Codeplex. If you would like to read more from the teams who have made these apps, James has a few quotes from them on his blog.
Now, I also mention the Windows Live Partner Initiative, as Microsoft tries to reach to some of their partners and showing them the benefits that can be had from using Windows Live. With it comes two new sites, http://partner.live.com/ and http://www.innovateonwindowslive.com/, and all this comes hot on the heels of the Partner Bot that the UK Partner team made, which Steve Clayton talks about, and can be added to your Messenger list by adding partnerbot@hotmail.com to your contact list.
And just to finish off with, for those that want even further Windows Live development information at their fingertips, Wrox have a book dedicated to Windows Live programming which covers all major aspects of taking on projects that use the Windows Live services.
Useful Links
http://dev.live.com/QuickApps - Home page for the new Quick Apps demos;
http://www.codeplex.com/WLQuickApps - Quick Apps home page on Codeplex;
http://www.innovateonwindowslive.com/ - Information about the opportunity of developing using Live Services;
http://partner.live.com/ - Partner resources for developing on Windows Live;
http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01/archive/2007/06/20/finally-partnerbot-is-live.aspx - Information on the Partner Bot.
SL