LiveSide - Developer Blog

Windows Live Web Toolbar Mashup – MessyTwit

Hackersoft — Fri, 22 May 2009 18:16:00 GMT

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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Windows Live UI Controls

Hackersoft — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:49:00 GMT

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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Windows Live Web Toolbar – How to integrate into your site

Hackersoft — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:32:00 GMT

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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Live Messenger Web Toolkit

ScottIsAFool — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:54:00 GMT

With the Mix09 Keynote taking place later today (4pm GMT, watch it live at http://live.visitmix.com/ ), one of the things that will be shown at Mix is the Live Messenger Web Toolkit. Basically, the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit “enables developers...(read more)

Windows Live ID Customisation Now Live

ScottIsAFool — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:42:21 GMT

Ok, so this was actually live last week, but hey. James Senior blogged last week about Live ID Customisation last week, and also commented this week that LiveWIM have changed their Live ID Sign In page. This is actually a very simple process, and is all...(read more)

Live Mesh and Live Framework clients, now best friends

ScottIsAFool — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:18:10 GMT

For those who have been developing against the Live Framework, one of the biggest drawbacks of doing this is having to give up your Mesh client on your dev PC. The choice was sadly rather simple, either use the Live Framework client so you can develop...(read more)

Virtual Earth 6.2 KML Support, Part 1

derek chan — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:40:00 GMT

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:

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Creating a Web Messenger control from Scratch – Part 11

Hackersoft — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:52:00 GMT

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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Creating a Web Messenger control from Scratch – Part 10

Hackersoft — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:47:00 GMT

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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End Of The Line For Photos And Application Storage API

ScottIsAFool — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 08:59:59 GMT

Angus Logan has posted on dev.live.com that Microsoft will be switching off the end points for Photos and Application Storage . From Angus’ post: The Photos API CTP especially has been extremely useful for us, as we learned a ton about the functionality...(read more)

Creating a Web Messenger control from Scratch – Part 9

Hackersoft — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 19:40:00 GMT

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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LiveFX + Windows Live ID Client SDK = Safer Program

ScottIsAFool — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:12:00 GMT

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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A “Quick And Dirty” Live Mesh Silverlight Application

ScottIsAFool — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:45:00 GMT

After the LiveFX application I showed yesterday, I will now do the same but for a Silverlight Mesh App, so this would actually appear in your Live Desktop. Like yesterday’s tutorial, this is only really for those who have been given access to the LiveFX and Mesh SDK ‘bits’ at the moment, but when it does eventually go live for all developers, then you’ll be able to use the same tutorial.

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Live FX is here

Hackersoft — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:46:01 GMT

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...(read more)

Virtual Earth Basics Part 1 – Loading the Map

John OBrien — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:45:00 GMT

Welcome to the first part in series that takes you through the core functionality of the Microsoft’s Virtual Earth JavaScript control. Through example code I hope to either introduce you to the Virtual Earth control or show you how to do things better and highlight some things you may not have known. I will be making use of the jQuery JavaScript library to provide valuable helper functions and simplify our code. If you feel there is something that could done better please share your ideas in the comments below.

Lets start by loading the Virtual Earth map on a page. Sounds trivial? Well it is, but lets do it as if you were building a real world application and include:

Browser detection to only load the map for supported browsers
Binding to the body onload method programmatically as you may not have access to the actual HTML tag
Dispose the map when you are done
Load the Virtual Earth JavaScript after the page has loaded to make things load fast
Have a onLoadedMap method where you can add your data once the map has loaded
Put your code and styles in external files from the HTML page itself

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