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Farewell Technet!

James Senior — Tue, 19 May 2009 03:46:00 GMT

I'm moving home to a new blog at www.jamessenior.com! This move also represents a rebrand for both myself and my content but more explained in my first post: Welcome from Microsoft's Social Web Guy!

It has been an emotional three years on the TechNet platform and I want to say thank you for all the loyal readers out there that have put up with all my ramblings for long enough. See you on the other side, and have fun! :-)

All the best,

James

Code using Live Search APIs and win $10k

James Senior — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:44:00 GMT

The Live Search team have just launched a cool competition in partnership with the Gnomedex conference where developers can win $10,000 and other cash prizes that have in impact on the economy or earth’s ecology.

The only caveat is that submitted applications must use Live Search APIs! You can create apps on whatever platform or language you prefer and you can also use any other APIs that you want from other service providers.

Why not take this opportunity to check out the other APIs provided by Live Services so you can build them in too! http://dev.live.com

IDEA: An app that incorporates search and Messenger would be pretty cool for sharing interesting search results with your friends.

More information on the competition here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2009/04/14/will-you-code-for-green-this-spring.aspx

Client or the Cloud?

James Senior — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:47:30 GMT

Paisano writes a punchy post about the death of desktop apps that I commented on and I wanted to share a bit more insight into where we’re taking the concept of Mesh in order to solve some of the problems that he identified.

Whilst the browser is great for some types of apps like collaboration, sharing, broadcasting it’s far from perfect. The number one problem is speed. A browser is slow. Why do you think Google have been trying so hard to speed up their JavaScript engine? No matter how much tweaking they do they’ll always be slower though. Client apps, i.e. ones that can harness the power of the device they are running on are much quicker, have richer experiences and can do things the browser simply can’t, utilize multi-core for example.

Look at Twitter, quite frankly their website is poor. It’s constantly broken, slow, yesterday I tried to register an account – I got the fail whale. Not good. How then, are they so successful? Why do people continue to use Twitter? It’s about the APIs and the way you can develop applications on their service. TweetDeck has been very successful because it provides a better experience for the service than anyone else – far better than Twitter.com even. Could you build a website in AJAX that was as slick as TweetDeck? No, because the app has the browser in the way of that computing muscle.

When the walled gardens fall as services become more open and data portability becomes the norm, the one true differentiator will be user experience. If I can get a better user experience on a client application then I will use it, period.

Now, onto the second gripe. With desktop apps (Silverlight 3, Air, WPF, Native etc) you have to install and configure them individually on different machines. He’s right this is a pain and another example is when you blow away your machine and reinstall the OS. After this you have to install all your apps and configure your settings to get back to the way you had it before. This is time consuming. I want to be doing other stuff instead!

This is where Live Mesh and Live Services (the underlying services for developers) comes to the rescue. The premise behind Mesh is that people have data, applications, devices all over the place. As the device explosion continues, keeping applications and data that people care about close to them is going to become increasingly difficult to do.

Mesh makes that happen by providing applications that run online or offline, sync both user data and app settings between devices and the cloud, and leverage the local device’s horsepower to provide a rich user experience.

Brazil rocking Windows 1.01

James Senior — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 03:55:36 GMT

Well their website for their IT Pro/Developer event is anyway! Check it out here! Way retro! Nice work guys.

http://www.puertadeenlace.net/run09/

Oh and check out the Silverlight version of Windows 7 too…

Announcing the Live Framework Explorer for Visual Studio

James Senior — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:02:46 GMT

At PDC back in October we launched the Live Framework into CTP and with that we provided a cool tool called the Live Framework Resource Model Browser which you could use to explore the data that you stored in the Mesh. The tool was good but limited. It was difficult to navigate the data, find what you were looking for and also make changes to the data itself. Furthermore, it was a separate tool so I had to jump out of Visual Studio to navigate the data in Mesh.

We worked with Wygwam to build a cool tool for Visual Studio 2008 that allows you to tap into the Mesh and browse the data in your Live Framework apps. Here’s what you can do with the Live Framework Explorer:

Integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio 2008
Read, Edit, Delete easily stored in the Mesh
Upload/Download files into the Mesh
Search for strings in the Mesh
and more…

The Live Framework Explorer is a CodePlex project which you can download and also check out the source code for. If you’ve got feedback or ideas for the Live Framework Explorer then let us know in the Codeplex!

Get it here: http://lfe.codeplex.com/

Watch Greg from Wygwam demo the Live Framework Explorer in his rock star Mix Session online (here) search for session MIX09-T76M!

Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit

James Senior — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:34:36 GMT

Just announced this at Mix09. Here’s what you need to know. Here’s where you need to go for more information: http://dev.live.com/messenger

Live Framework SDK and Tools April CTP

James Senior — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 03:36:48 GMT

What is the Live Framework? – see my video on Channel 9

Bit late to the press with this one, but that’s because I’ve been working on some way cool stuff for next week at Mix :-)

The Live Framework SDK and Tools April CTP has just been launched! Not really sure why they launched mid-March and called it an April CTP – but hey, I’m not complaining when you get:

All-in-one installer (like a multivitamin – lots of goodness in one capsule)
Support for Win7 and IE8 (satisfies even the most demanding dogfooder)
Side-by-side installation of Live Framework CTP and Live Mesh Beta (now be a consumer and dev – all at the same time!)
Performance Improvements (we’re super slick, just like Win7)
and more

For the full announcement check out the Live Framework Team Blog and get the download itself here:

DOWNLOAD THE TOOLS AND SDK
DOWNLOAD THE SDK ONLY

Live Messenger: our network is your network

James Senior — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:49:03 GMT

I was doing some background reading on Live Messenger today via Wikipedia and it said that the first version of messenger (then MSN Messenger) came out in 1999! wow that seems so long ago, and look how much has changed since then!

Above – Messenger then and now.

Since then, we’ve had many new versions culminating in the latest, a part of Windows Live Essentials and there have been some very cool features along the way. It’s crazy to think we had voice call (voip) in 2000 (Skype wasn’t in beta until 2003) and then video calls followed in version 5 in 2002!

What’s perhaps more impressive is the back end infrastructure that Live Messenger runs on in the cloud. With over 320 million users worldwide and being the world’s #1 free instant messaging service it means that you need some pretty hefty investments in the cloud to make this stuff run reliably, securely and at scale so that customers get the experiences they deserve.

One of the other cool things is we’ve opened up the platform to allow developers to build web experiences that use the service and bring instant messaging onto their websites using Live Messenger. I’m talking of course about the Messenger Library and the IM controls which are client-side JavaScript libraries that connect to the Messenger Service allow for more engaging experiences.

One thing I’ve noticed when playing around with the Messenger Library and IM Controls are that whilst they are amazingly powerful tools I had to code my IM platform from the ground up. Still, the end result was cool and it gave my website a completely new angle for attracting new users and keeping them on my site for longer.

LiveWIM using customized sign-in pages for Live ID

James Senior — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:43:12 GMT

I blogged last week about the new documentation available for customizing the registration and sigin-in pages for Live ID and we’re already starting to see some examples in the wild.

LiveWIM, a site for tracking your whereabouts and letting your friends know, have gone and implemented and the results are pretty cool. The thing I like, as well as the familiarity of the LiveWIM logo is that I get a list of remembered Live IDs so I don’t have to type in my credentials. If I’ve actually asked Live ID to remember my password then I can just click the Live ID and it signs me in no hassle – also a cool feature.

Customize Live ID Sign in and Registration experience

James Senior — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 01:34:41 GMT

One of the biggest bits of feedback from customers that use Live ID on their website is that the Live ID sign-in and registration experiences should be customizable so that instead of a Windows Live brand and look and feel, the user gets a look and feel consistent with your website so they aren’t confused as to why the brand has changed.

Old Sign-in Experience

New Sign-in Experience

We’ve just launched the ability to customize the sign-in experience so that you can now achieve something that looks like this:

New Sign-in Experience Customization Areas

You can customize everything in orange:

The technical documentation is here:

Overview on Customizing the Sign-in Experience

Old Registration Experience

New Registration Experience

You are now able to customize the registration experience in the following way:

Thematically, by changing the fonts, colors, and images that appear on the registration pages.
Contextually, by selecting a registration flow. A registration flow determines what information users must provide when creating a Windows Live ID, and how users are asked for that information.

Here is the documentation you need:

Customizing the Registration Experience

Imagine a killer Live Services app – win a pass to Mix09

James Senior — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:37:55 GMT

This year I’m in the privileged position of being involved in possibly the greatest conference the world has ever seen. Yes, I’m talking about Mix09 – Microsoft’s annual web conference held at the Venetian in Las Vegas. This year’s conference is being held 18-20th Match and promises to be a stunning affair with jar dropping keynotes, industry leading speakers and inspiring sessions all set amongst the best place to party! :-)

For your chance to win a free pass (worth $1400) to this year’s event all you have to do is:

Dream up a killer app that uses services from Live Services and/or Live Framework and record a one minute video of yourself presenting it via Soapbox or YouTube.

As part of your pass you get full access to the conference, food and drink and an invite to the hottest party on the strip at club TAO – oh yeah and drinks are on us :-) All you need to do is get yourself there and pay hotel bills.

I’ll also showcase the top 3 killer apps right here on my blog.

Here are the steps you must follow to be considered:

You imagine an application that uses Live Services and/or Live Framework
Record a one minute video of yourself presenting the idea on a webcam
Upload the video to Soapbox or YouTube
Post the link to the video in the comments of this blog entry
The application must be original or extend an already existing app
Submission deadline: February 23rd, 23:00 pm PST

On February 24th, I will review the entries and choose the best one. My criteria will be:

Originality – can be based on a couple of things
- Have you got a really novel new idea
- Have you extended an existing app in an interesting way
Entertaining/funny
Presentation style
That’s it :)

So where to start? How about what Live Services are available? Here are some of them:

Contacts – get your Live address book into your app, lookup your buddies
Virtual Earth – map your stuff in your app
Messenger – add instant messaging in your app
Mesh – sync and share your data across multiple devices and work offline
Live Search – bring back search results into your app
Photos – use photos from your Windows Live Spaces

Inspire yourself with the Windows Live Quick Apps.

Here are some links I’ve put together to get you on your way

Developer portal for Live Services
Developer portal for Live Framework

The Live Framework Architecture

(Belated) Happy 25th Birthday Mac

James Senior — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 04:47:35 GMT

I’ve been meaning to say happy birthday to the Apple Mac for the past few weeks and finally got round to it. Apple were a part of my life from an early age (my dad worked in the UK office) and as kids growing up we got our grubby paws on all sorts of cool technology. Looking back at the timeline of the Macintosh I can remember playing with the Mac Lisa all the way up to 6100, 6200 and everything in between. That’s almost 10 years of hardware right there.

In the above picture I’m playing Pinball with my sister on the Apple IIe (I think). She was never destined to be a geek (you can tell because she’s eating the controller).

My colleague Brian Keller kindly added a Live Mesh orb into the picture suggesting that I was actually using an early Mesh CTP prototype. I can neither confirm or deny those rumors :)

Live Services Jumpstart Training Videos

James Senior — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 04:27:34 GMT

Couldn’t make it to the Live Services Jumpstart training earlier this year? Don’t fret, we’ve just published the recordings from these sessions on the Live Services Developer Portal.

Go download, learn, enjoy and create wonderful things:

http://dev.live.com/training

The Microsoft Store

James Senior — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 02:48:05 GMT

About bloody time. Hooray! Microsoft are going to do retail stores. I think every Microsoft employee has at one time thought about starting one of these up, I know I did!

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/feb09/02-12CVPRetailStoresPR.mspx

Live Services How Do I Videos

James Senior — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:49:36 GMT

Now in embedded flavor right here on the blog, enjoy:

If you can see this, your browser doesn't understand IFRAME

Azure Services “How Do I” Videos

James Senior — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 05:41:04 GMT

Get your head around the Azure Services Platform in the videos we’ve just released on MSDN. We’ve got Windows Azure courtesy of Dr Aiken, .NET Services courtesy of Sir Nigel Watling and Live Services on the scene thanks to myself and Angus Logan.

Get the downloads here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/dd439432.aspx

We’ll be posting more videos very, very soon. Stay tuned using the RSS for updates: RSS

Custom Branding for Live ID authentication and Data Portability

James Senior — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:55:19 GMT

We announced a couple of cool things today on the back of Safer Internet Day which was yesterday and the Open ID UX summit which took place in Silicon Valley too.

Custom Branding for Live ID Authentication
Legitimate developer libraries for moving address book data around

Custom Branding

The upside of this is that users get a familiar experience when logging into their Live ID account because developers are now able to skin the login screen with their own site brand. Before, hopping from XYZ.com website to a Windows Live branded website to login was confusing to the user and often caused them to cancel what they were doing because they were uncertain why they had been redirected from the original site.

Legitimate Data Portability

Rather than screen scraping or getting the user to type in their credentials into a third party site, both which are bad practices. We’ve worked with Octazen to provide libraries for PHP (.NET/Java in the near future) so that using the legitimate Windows Live Contact API is easy to do and the user gets a trustworthy experience when sharing their information with other sites.

For more information on these announcements head over to the Dev.live.com blog where you can see more screenshots and explanation to the technology and experiences that you can now get.

http://dev.live.com/blogs/devlive/archive/2009/02/11/470.aspx

Azure Services Training Kit

James Senior — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:43:16 GMT

Last week we released the Azure Services Platform Training Kit. There’s content aplenty including Decks, Demos and Labs – so much goodness it’s almost untrue!

Here’s the a la carte menu:

The Azure Services Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content including hands-on labs, presentations, and demos that are designed to help you learn how to use the Azure Services Platform. The February release includes the following updates:

19 demo scripts that walkthrough several of the services

10 presentations covering the entire Azure Services Platform

3 additional hands-on labs for Live Services

Yes that’s right my friends, Live Services Hands-on Labs :-)

Feel the Azure Services love with the download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=413E88F8-5966-4A83-B309-53B7B77EDF78&displaylang=en

Mesh and the Imagine Cup

James Senior — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:05:06 GMT

This year Mesh is in the thick of the action with the Imagine Cup 2009! This year the competition is in Egypt and we’re excited about the cool apps that students are going to build using the Live Framework and Mesh Services, Contacts and Profiles.

Here’s the scoop on Mesh from the Imagine Cup Website:

Mesh Services and Live Framework are building blocks that bring software and internet services together and put you in control of your digital world. They allow you to interact with applications, files, people, and devices that matter the most and make sure you are in sync with them wherever you are and whenever you need them. Mesh Services provide exciting new opportunities for developers that bring traditional client and web applications to life and introduce new classes of applications to the developer toolkit. Experience Mesh and learn about developing on Mesh Services. Live Framework provides one place to program against Mesh Services and other exciting Live Services like Live Contacts, Live Profile and much more. These are the same things that power the Windows Live and Mesh experiences. Now you have their power at your disposal! No matter what languages, platforms or developer tools you use, you’ll find that with the Live Framework you will be able to create exciting new applications across the web, desktop and devices and enhance your existing applications with new capabilities. To incorporate Mesh Services & Live Framework in your Imagine Cup solution: click here.

Check out the competition website for more information!

www.imaginecup.com

Live Framework Tools January CTP

James Senior — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 22:37:05 GMT

The Live Framework Tools are for Visual Studio and make it very easy to build, upload and debug Mesh-enabled Web Apps in the Live Desktop in the cloud. On Friday the team did a new drop of the tools which is called the Live Framework Tools January CTP.

To download and do anything useful with the tools you need to sign up for Live Framework CTP Token – Lynn has a great post on how to do this.

Here’s the info on what’s included in the new drop:

Live Framework Tools January CTP

The Live Framework Tools team is pleased to announce the January CTP update. This update contains a number of fixes. Please see below for details. And as always, thank you for using Live Framework.

New in this release

The Live Framework Tools January CTP includes a number of bug fixes. A few of the most notable fixes are listed below:

Debugging or running a Mesh-enabled Web Application which contains no changes from previous versions immediately launches the application instead of re-uploading the files.
Mesh-enabled Web Applications created by the Live Framework Tools now have identical offers to those created through the Azure Services Developer Portal, which are generally less restrictive. This change removes the need for the workaround mentioned in this thread.
Projects created by the Live Framework Tools may now contain periods fixing the issue reported in this bug.
Changes to the application's logo.png file will now be reflected in the icon that appears on the Live Desktop fixing the issue reported in this thread.
Error messages and diagnostics have been improved. In certain error situations additional information can now be located in the application event log.

In addition to the fixes listed above, the January CTP includes a feature that will offer to notify you of any future updates to the Live Framework Tools.

Running Mesh Beta Client at the same time as Live Framework CTP Client

James Senior — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:53:22 GMT

For those of you who are busy developing applications for Mesh using Live Framework, you will be aware of the problem that until now you couldn’t run the Mesh Beta Client at the same time as the Live Framework CTP.

Fortunately, we’ve put together a workaround that allows your to run both alongside one another so you can get the goodness of Mesh Beta with it’s sync across multiple devices and Live Framework CTP which provides the developer sandbox so you can create apps to land in the Mesh!

Here are the steps, enjoy!

To run both Mesh Client Beta (installed from www.mesh.com) and Live Framework Client (installed from developer.mesh-ctp.com) side by side:

1. Uninstall Live Framework Client.

2. Install Mesh Client Beta from www.mesh.com.

3. Add the following registry item:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Live Framework Client\AllowSxS = 1 (DWORD)

4. Install Live Framework client from developer.mesh-ctp.com.

To make sure both clients working properly, you need follow the exact install order above.

There are some known issues:

· It might be confusing which client you are signing. You can tell the difference from the title of the sign in dialog. The title with “Live Mesh Beta” is the client targeting www.mesh.com.

The title with “Live Mesh TECH PREVIEW” is Live Framework Client targeting developer.mesh-ctp.com.

After sign in, you will see two icons in your system tray:

· With both clients installed, if users uninstall Mesh Client Beta (some users might see black screen for a few seconds), users are signed off automatically from Live Framework Client. When users sign in again, they may get an error while login to Live Framework Client like:

Users may not sign in again even after restart the client. To workaround, download httpcfg.exe and run the following command line with escalated privilege:

httpcfg.exe set urlacl -u http://localhost:2048/ -a D:(A;;GX;;;WD)

Then restart the Live Framework Client and sign in.

· If users install Live Framework Client first and then install Mesh Client Beta later, users will be signed out automatically from live Framework Client. Users have to restart the client and sign in again.

Windows Azure & Azure Services Platform Token Acquisition Explained

James Senior — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:44:11 GMT

If you’ve played around with Windows Azure and/or Azure Services Platform you’ll know that getting tokens can be somewhat a pain. Firstly, sorry about that, there’s all kinds of reasons why this is the case that I won’t bore you with here.

Fortunately, Lynn the SouthCal girl has written a great article on getting the process done, and done right. Thanks Lynn!!

ComScore Internet Stats

James Senior — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:26:47 GMT

Computerworld reported today that the number of visitors to internet sites has risen to 1 billion. Here’s the lowdown:

The Google family of sites led all online properties in December, with 777.9 million visitors, comScore reported. Microsoft was next, with 647.9 million visitors, followed by the Yahoo sites with 562.6 million visitors and Facebook with 222 million visitors. ComScore noted that Facebook showed 127% growth in the past year.

Some other interesting stats about Microsoft:

There are over a billion Windows users worldwide
There are over half a billion active Windows Live users worldwide

Kind of puts the scale of Microsoft’s business in perspective.

Software + Services explained

James Senior — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:24:26 GMT

Interesting Media Center Stats

James Senior — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:42:37 GMT

Paul has some interesting stats about Media Center following CES last week:

CES is the first consumer showcase of Windows Media Center in Windows 7.
- Windows 7 includes a number of enhancements for Windows Media Center, including the new Electronic Program Guide (EPG), which gives you all of your internet TV in one place
- Windows Media Center in Windows 7 also delivers choice in how you interact with your PC, highlighted by HP TouchSmart UI and features such as Turbo Scroll
- The ability to access Windows 7 content almost anywhere with PlayTo functionality

Momentum: We’re at an exciting juncture for connected TV experiences, and people are increasingly going to Windows Media Center to watch TV on the PC:
- Nearly 10 million unique users are regularly using Windows Media Center in any given month.
- Each session is averaging nearly 90 minutes – that’s a huge number when you compare it to other Internet-based TV applications and far exceeds the traditional “snacking” of online content.

New Windows Media Center Platform Support

Toshiba joined the growing support from major CE companies enabling Windows Media Center experiences to extend to the TV by announcing they will integrate Extenders for Window Media Center technology into a series of TVs, LCD/DVD combo products and standalone network players, along with the "Widget Channel" backed by Intel and Yahoo! Click here for the press release.

I use Media Center excessively – it’s great for playing music from my collection (love the fact I can use a remote). The TV recording is top notch, and when you’ve got dual tuners configured it’s superb – watch one thing while recording another! I feel that now more and more tv, music and other media is coming over the internet, Windows Media Center is really well placed to be a great way of enjoying all that content.

Throw in a bit of socializing, sharing and community via Windows Live and you’ve got a sweet product. :-)