A lot of people nowadays have Twitter accounts, a Facebook account etc. and if you’re reading this then I’m also assuming you have a Windows Live account and some interest in Windows Live Services. Each of these have their own “Personal Message” where you can tell people what you are currently doing and there-in lies the problem. You have to visit each of these places to update them individually. Why not have a central place where you can update them all?

The good news is that you can. There are various ways of doing this, whether through a website or a Silverlight application. Basically anything that can use web services. With Microsoft’s recent introduction of the Windows Live Web Toolbar, I thought I’d do just that and show you how easy it is.  I will be building upon my previous articles regarding the new Windows Live controls so please go check them out if you haven’t already as I’ve discussed a lot of the code present in this mashup in previous articles.

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Following on from my previous tutorial on how to integrate the Windows Live Web Bar into your site, we’ll build upon this and show you some of the other UI controls that you can use in your site.

One thing that a lot of people might want to do is display the signed-on users’ display picture somewhere on the site other than in the web-bar.

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A few months ago at Mix 09, the Windows Live Team launched a number of exciting new additions under the Windows Live Web Toolkit. One of which was the Windows Live Web Toolbar. This toolbar allows you include presence information into your site as well as other social experiences.

In this tutorial I will show you just how easy it is to incorporate the Web Toolbar into your own site.

First of all, you need to have access to the Windows Azure development portal. In order to use the Web Toolbar you need to register with Azure and receive an application ID and secret Key :-

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In this the final installment of this series of tutorials for the moment we will be completing the Web Messenger control by adding the ability for users to actually hold conversations.



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So far in this series we have covered quite a bit of ground including customizing the sign-in control, groups, contacts, new features of the 2.5 API including user images etc. For this part we will do a simple search function. If you can remember, one of our original goals was to mimic the Messenger Client as closely as possible with the limitations that a browser based User Control will have. If you take a look at the messenger client you will see a search bar :-


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After a little break due to a very heavy work schedule, we’re back with Part 9 of this mini-series explaining how to create a Web Messenger control that you can just drop into your web sites. It’s hard to believe that we’re currently on Part 9 of this series of tutorials. In the last part we discussed Groups within Web Messenger. Users can create their own groups and place contacts within these groups, e.g. Co-Workers, Friends, Family etc. Now that we’ve got groups, it’s now time to place the actual contacts within the appropriate group.



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Building an application that uses the LiveFX is easy. So is building an application that uses Windows Live ID. Using the Windows Live ID Client SDK also means that you’re not asking a user to supply your application with the username and password which means that the user can remain safe that they’re not just giving out their username and password for the program to with as he wishes. So if both sorts of programs are easy, is it easy to combine the two? Well, yes.

In Visual Studio, I created a quick Windows Form that looks like the following:

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So far in this series we have learned about the Sign-In control, how to use it and the new features allowing you customize and hide it. We have also learned about the User class, how to implement that and also some of it’s new features such as the ability to display the user’s sign-in picture. The next step in our journey through the Web Messenger API and our Custom Control is contacts. After all there is little point in having a messenger control if you have nobody to talk to.

In Windows Live Messenger, there is the ability to group your contacts. You can place each contact into a group so that referencing a contact becomes quicker and Messenger is easier to manage. So before we delve into Contacts themselves, we need to implement groups.

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Before moving onto the next part of the Web Messenger User Control, I was running through the code I have developed so far and happened upon a couple of bugs, so this part of the Web Messenger User Control tutorial will be a short one fixing the bugs in the code we have so far.

On fixing these bugs the User Control works as expected and you end up with something akin to the following :-



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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 series we covered customizing the Windows Live Sign-In Control and some of the new features that have been added to the API for this control. In this part we will cover some of the new features that are available for Users’ Contacts and the User him/herself.

So now that you are able to sign-in to your messenger User Control, we want to display some information about who’s actually signed in.



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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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In the last part of this series we added the necessary framework to put in the place the sign-in control and get it working.



So now that you’ve got the sign-in control displayed in your User Control, what can you do with it? Well there are a few options that allow you customize certain parts of the control and get some default information. First off we’ll take a look at the Links collection :-

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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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The preface to this little project is that at work I have been handed a project which is all about styling. Given the recent release of Windows Live Messenger Wave 3 beta, the new 2.5 API set and the customizations that you can now do with Messenger Client, I thought this would be a good opportunity to do a new Web Messenger control from scratch. There is a link there, believe me :)

Anyway, in my previous dealings with Web Messenger I’ve built the control directly into the web page itself. This time around I thought I’d build a User Control so that it could be easily dropped into any page. This in itself brings about some problems of it’s own. ...