When I interviewed Angus Logan and Danny Thorpe at MixUK back in September, we were told about a new toolkit that would be coming for Visual Studio that would be very similar in design to the Facebook toolkit that Microsoft released. Well the time has come that you can now download the toolkit yourself and start using the controls that come with it.

To download it, head on over to the Windows Live Dev Connect page on Microsoft Connect, go to the download page and download it.

In this entry I will be giving an overview of what is in the Toolkit, and I plan on doing a more detailed post soon, so keep your eyes peeled. First things first, you need to make sure you have all the prerequisites installed, these are the Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax 1.0 extensions and the Microsoft ASP.NET Futures (July 2007). Once those and the Toolkit are installed, you're good to go and you can fire up Visual Studio 2008 (no VS2005 as yet).

The toolkit at the moment gives you the following tools for your ASP.NET application:

• Contacts using the Windows Live Contacts Control
• SilverlightStreamingMedia using Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live
• IDLogin
• IDLoginView, both using Windows Live ID Web Authentication.

As well as a template for an ASP.NET website using Windows Live:

So you can now start using some of the power leveraged from Windows Live in your ASP.NET application with greater ease.

Update: This is now live on http://dev.live.com/tools/ complete with references for the different controls.

SL

PS, I'd also like to say congratulations to Liveside friend Ian Moulster on his new job role