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.

If you want to get a start with some of the Windows Live SDKs, then it can be a daunting task. You could try looking for tutorials on the chosen SDK, or look at the examples that usually come with the SDK package. But with two of them you are actually provided with an interactive SDK that you can use and create your own code based on what you put choose. At the moment there are only two interactive SDKs, and they are provided for Live Search and Virtual Earth. Each one has its own advantages for usage, Live Search is a great starting point for your C# project, whether it be an ASP.NET project or a WinForms project; the Virtual Earth one is good for even the most basic of users, as it has the ability to let you put the code simply into a webpage and can easily give you, for example, a "Where are we" sort of page for your website.