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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:
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 :-
The Windows Live team have been busy over the past few months and recently launched the Windows Live Messenger APIs. This is basically split over three parts, the IM Control, the Windows Live Presence API and the Windows Live Messenger Library.
What all this allows you to do is to create a Windows Live Messenger plug-in for your own website. What this (and coming articles) will try to explain is how to use these API's to actually create and integrate Messenger on your site as you can see below.
If you head over to Codeplex you will find a number of Contoso Quick Applications posted there. Each one demonstrating various aspects of the Windows Live platform and showing you a "real world" style application that makes use of them, along with the source code so that you can easily apply the various techniques to your own web site.
Today another web application has been released. The focus of this application is Silverlight and Windows Live Search. This short article will give you a quick overview of it's main features without doing a "deep dive" into exactly how it works.
The Context
Most people that I've known can relate to this. You come across a problem and you need to do some online research, say for example, how to integrate Windows Live ID in with your web site. So you hit the Internet and start doing some searches, you find bits of information of one web site, some bits on one blog post, some bits on another. Then you want to find some images for a login and logout button. So you've got all these web sites that you need to remember where the information is and you possibly may also need to share you're research will a fellow worker that's working on the project with you.
Well this is where Tafiti comes in. Tafiti, which means "do research" in Swahili, is an experimental search front-end from Microsoft, designed to help people use the Web for research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results. Tafiti uses both Microsoft Silverlight and Live Search to explore the intersection of richer experiences on the Web and the increasing specialization of search. Tafiti is also available as a standalone site for those that don't want to dig into the code and just use or sample the application first hand, just head over to Tafiti.com.
In the previous two articles I showed you how to use the Windows Live ID login control in your web site then we developed a custom Membership provider so that you could hook Windows Live ID in with asp.net's build in user management features. This article will show you it's easy to hook these things together.
A lot of the code you in this article should be familiar to you by now, it really is just a case of hooking them together.
In the first part of this article I explained how to integrate Windows Live ID into your own web site, how to call it and what information it returned and how to access that information.
Now that is all fine and well but if you're using ASP.Net 2.0 (and above) and you want to take advantage of the inbuilt memberships, roles etc. the information returned from Live ID doesn't make this easy on you. So how do you do this? Well there are a number of different ways to do this but possibly the easiest is to create your own MemberShip provider and use to store and access the information.
In this article we will be building a Membership provider that you can call with the very basic information that Live ID returns to you (basically the only useful thing it returns is a static ID string that will always be consistent for your registered web site.
With the release of the Windows Live ID SDK comes the ability to add the trusted security of Windows Live to your application, but how much work is needed to actually get this functionality into your program? Turns out, not a lot. In fact, for just getting a working sign in window and a message to show that the user is authenticated, it only requires about 5 lines of code that you need to write. Here I will show you how to add basic functionality to your program to give you a quickstart with using the SDK.