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.

Overview

KML (Keyhole Markup Language), an XML schema originally developed for Google Earth to describe shapes on a map has been supported by VE since version 6.0 was released and has remain unchanged up to VE 6.2.  The common questions this series will address are "Which KML features does VE support?" and "How do I use these features?" for developers with no KML experience.

KML Quickstart

If you haven't already, take a look at the Interactive SDK (http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/sdk/ ) and MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb429606.aspx ) on to see how to load a feed into VE. I had trouble loading KML locally (GeoRSS was okay) using any browser even with a website setup through IIS.  I found that uploading my KML file to SkyDrive and referencing the URL worked.  Finally, you'll need to open the google KML documentation page (http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/kmlreference.html) to follow along.

Here is a sample KML loader taken from the SDK with a few modifications:

Welcome back to the third part of our deep dive in the Windows Live Quick Apps Website featuring the Contoso Bicycle Club. In this part we’ll take apart one of the main JavaScript function calls that this web site uses, updatePage.

This is the main routine in the application and the one that controls the content for the main area of screen.

Welcome back to the second part of our deep dive in the Windows Live Quick Apps Website featuring the Contoso Bicycle Club. In this part we’ll take a look at another custom user control found on the home page, the Latest Rides feed.

This control is like the previous control we took apart in the first part of the deep dive, but with some changes to that manifest themselves into what looks like a completely different control.

The Contoso Bicycle Club is a demonstration website put together to show off a number of Windows Live technologies and how easy it is to integrate these technologies into your own websites. The source code for both this web site and a second web site entitled Contoso University are available for download from CodePlex.

One note before we proceed any further. Both of these websites are written to run with Visual Studio Orcas (Beta 2 and above). Both applications also use Asp.Net Ajax and the Contoso Bicycle Club also requires the Asp.Net Ajax Toolkit. Both Asp.Net Ajax, the Toolkit and also Asp.Net Ajax Futures are freely downloadable from here.

In this deep dive series, we will take apart the web application and explain in detail exactly how it was put together.

This is essentially a supplement to Scotts articles on how to write a Windows Live Writer plugin. In this article I'll show you how to implement a simple Amazon Web Service lookup and take that information to create a simple layout for a book review blog post.

Live Writer plugins basically fall into a number of categories but the one in this simple example to get you all started is probably the easiest one to start coding with and is based on the CreateContent API. Windows Live Plugins work in essentially the same way for each type of plugin that you create. You have a main cs (or vb) class file that instantiates any windows forms that you want to use, gather the information then plonk that information into Windows Live Writer. The basic example we'll start coding is a book review template. To make things slightly easier, we use Amazon web services to look certain information about the book and also to get a picture of the front cover of the book.

Over the last year, we've had all sorts of different SDKs released for Windows Live products and services, but yesterday saw the announcement of not another seperate SDK, but the collective Windows Live SDKs. I think this has been a given all along, but we have the "official" status now. So what SDKs are bound by the WL SDK? Taken from the Windows Live SDK page on MSDN, it includes all the following: