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Thanks to Angus Logan for the heads up on this.  Live FX is now up and running with some demo’s and sample code to get you started. Also the Live FX team has started a new blog which you can find at http://blogs.msdn.com/liveframework/ For further...

Via Mary-Jo Foley and Angus Logan we learn that Microsoft has just aired the site Live Services Jumpstart 2009 for their ‘secret training’ sessions ‘to explore the full breadth of the consumer components of … Live Services’...

Continuing our series on the Web Messenger control we will take a look at a couple of more API calls you can make and give your control added functionality. Going back to our class there are another couple of properties that are quite interesting :-



The first of these is the Mailbox property.

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In the last part of this tutorial we covered the links and the new Show and Hide functionality of the Sign-In control. In this part, as promised, we will get to the customization options that are available to you with the Sign-In control.



Taking a quick look at the Sign-In control API we see that there is a Style property. As with the links property covered in an earlier article, this is a getter that returns a class of type SignInControlStyle. So once you have got a reference to this class what does it offer you?


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Following on from the first part of this article where we managed to register Ajax classes and get a basic outline that we can play around with for our new messenger User Control, we come onto logging in to web messenger.

The basic framework that we setup in part 1 easily allows us to play around with certain settings, styling's etc. As most people will no doubt be aware, Windows Live Messenger Client Wave 3 beta was launched last week, and our goal is get similar functionality in our User Control. There are a number of enhancements made to the Wave 3 beta, not least of which is visuals. Gone are the little MSN Men to be replaced by colors representing a users status. Green meaning that they are online, white offline etc. There are two modes for this, dots as shown in this image :-



or the contacts picture with the color outline as shown here, next to the cheesiest grin I’ve ever seen by Angus Logan :-



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Keiji has just posted on the Messenger Developer blog that the Windows Live Messenger Library has been updated to version 2.5 . Highlights of this release are: Easier access to most common contact properties Contact status, display name, personal message...

Hopefully you will have read and followed the code from the first part of this article. The first part covered most of base functionality including how to sign in, get the users details and get their contact list. What is left is how to actually carry out a conversation with a contact. If you remember from the first article, in the signInCompleted event handler we defined three delegates to handle various events. The first part of this article talked about the first two of these delegates, and that leaves the last one to talk about :-

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My friend Luke Smith and I for the last month have been working on a new .Net wrapper for Windows Live, which we have called LiveNet. You might be thinking "what's the difference between that and Windows Live Tools", and the answer is simple, a fair bit. Windows Live Tools has what you need for Windows Live ID web authentication, Silverlight Streaming and Contacts control, which we don't do anything with. Now at this point, I would just like to say that the Contacts control is the embedded object, whereas what LiveNet will [eventually] have is from Windows Live Data.

We have made this a .Net 2.0 wrapper, so it can be used with any web application that is 2.0 or above and at the moment we have only implemented the Live Photos API into the wrapper. So what does this mean? It means that we have built a set of classes that will allow you to interact with the Live Photos API without having to worry about any of the back end goings on. I shall go into more detail with some examples in just a moment.

LiveNet is an opensource project that we have hosted on CodePlex, so feel free to check out the source code if you want to see what we're doing under the hood.

Version 0.1 is now ready for you:
Home Page: http://www.codeplex.com/LiveNet
Download: LiveNet 0.1 Alpha (including documentation)

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