Hey folks, Dave Treadwell here. For those who don’t know me, I run the Live Platform Services team here at Microsoft. Before coming over to the services world, I spent many years working on .NET, and I feel really fortunate to be working on a part of what I feel will be the next great round of developer platform infrastructure for the industry: platforms to make it easy to create awesome services-based applications.

I wanted to guest post today to let everyone know we’ve got some cool new applications and APIs we’re unveiling at MIX08. The Windows Live platform team has been working hard to expand our services for developers, so they can create rich new experiences for users. I’ll be covering:

• New services & existing services progress
• Standardization of frameworks & protocols
• New pre-release services/tools for experimentation and feedback
• Windows Live Quick Applications (demo web sites) updates

New services & progressing existing services

Windows Live Messenger Library (new to beta) – “Develop your own IM experience”

We are opening up the Windows Live Messenger network for third-party web sites to reach the 300 million+ Windows Live Messenger users. The library is a JavaScript client API, so the user experience is primarily defined by the third party. When a third party integrates the Windows Live Messenger Library into their site they can define the look & feel to create their own IM experience. Unlike the existing third party wrappers for the MSN Protocol (the underlying protocol for Windows Live Messenger) the Windows Live Messenger Library securely authenticates users, therefore their Windows Live ID credentials are safe.

iBloks have implemented the Windows Live Messenger library so consumers are able to share interactive experiences with their buddies – see it here. You can also check out the Tafiti application (open source code available here) for a great example of how to implement this API.

Contacts API (progressed to Beta) – “Bring your friends”

Our goal is to help developers keep users at the center of their experience by letting them control their data and contact portability, while keeping their personal information private. A big step forward in that effort is today’s release to beta of Windows Live Contacts API. Web developers can use this API in production to enable their customers to transfer and share their contacts lists in a secure, trustworthy way (i.e., no more screen scraping)—a great step on the road toward data portability. (For more on Microsoft’s view on data portability, check out Inder Sethi’s video.) By creating an optimized mode for invitations, it allows users to share only the minimum amount of information required to invite friends to a site, this includes firstname / lastname / preferred email address. The Contacts API uses the new Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication framework; you can find out more here.

Silverlight Streaming (progressed to beta) – “Use our infrastructure to deliver great experiences”

Silverlight™ Streaming by Windows Live is the companion service to Silverlight. We are increasing the free hosting and storage limit to 10 GB and can now stream HQ content at 1400Kbps (see a sample here). During the SLS alpha we saw most scenarios were media driven (i.e. video/audio) – to make it easier for content producers to get their media in front of their users, we have introduced a Video Management scenario which allows media to be uploaded in many formats (Flash, DIVX, MPEG-4, QuickTime, H.264, H.263, WMV1, WMV2, MPEG-1, MPEG-2) and we will transcode the content into a Silverlight™ compatible WMV/VC-1 format. For developers we have introduced a new WebDAV API for Silverlight Streaming which allows for file by file management and Web Folders support - for more information go here.

The updated service and documentation will be available next week.

Standardization of frameworks and protocols

We have made progress on standardization of frameworks and protocols to provide a more consistent, predictable experience for developers and consumers.

Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication--“Safely & securely enable data portability”

Today the Windows Live ID team released the Delegated Authentication SDK v1.0, which provides a platform-neutral way for web applications to access users' information from Windows Live services while the user remains in firm control of their own data.

Based on customer feedback, we have enhanced the delegation framework that was announced at MIX07. The enhancement will now become the standard for Windows Live users to safely & securely grant permission for third-party web sites to access their information (i.e. no need to share Live ID credential pairs). For more information on Delegated Authentication, check out today’s Windows Live ID blog post.

Like the Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK, we have samples available in ASP.NET / Java / PHP / Python / Perl / Ruby.

The specific enhancements are:

• When a user grants permission they can select the length of time a web site is allowed to access their data. (putting the user in control of their data)
• The underlying technology is more similar to Kerberos where a delegation token is only valid for 12 hours and a refresh token must be used (this reduces token fatigue).

Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) as the future direction

Microsoft is making a large investment in unifying our developer platform protocols for services on the open, standards-based Atom format (RFC 4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023). At MIX we are enabling several new Live services with AtomPub endpoints which enable any HTTP-aware application to easily consume Atom feeds of photos and for unstructured application storage (see below for more details). Or you can use any Atom-aware public tools or libraries, such as .NET WCF Syndication to read or write these cloud service-based feeds.

In addition, these same protocols and the same services are now ADO.NET Data Services (formerly known as “ Project Astoria”) compatible. This means we now support LINQ queries from .NET code directly against our service endpoints, leveraging a large amount of existing knowledge and tooling shared with on-premise SQL deployments.

The intent for these early, experimental releases are to gather valuable feedback from the community around our idiomatic and freely licensed extensions to AtomPub which deal with important service scenarios, such as URL formats, nested directories, image streams, and service metadata. You can read more about this on the Project Astoria team blog.

There will also be a few more surprises in this area announced at MIX. Stay tuned. Try them out and give us your feedback!

Pre-release services for experimentation & feedback

Developer Tools – Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio (CTP Refresh) “Drag and Drop Live Services into your apps”

The February CTP refresh of the Windows Live Tools will provide rich developer support for the Windows Live Messenger IM Control. You can easily integrate Windows Live services into your ASP.NET applications by dragging and dropping these ASP.NET server controls onto the canvas.

The updated tools and documentation will be available next week.

The community has been busy creating .NET wrappers for Windows Live services, LiveNet is a community development by some developers in the UK – check it out here.

Application Based Storage

Application Based storage is an experimental API which allows application developers to store a small amount of state/configuration data in the Windows Live data centers on behalf of a user. This API has an AtomPub service end point so developers will be able to call this using ADO.NET data services or other AtomPub compatible tools. The real value kicks in here if an application was to have hundreds of thousands of users as the client bandwidth and storage are offloaded to Windows Live infrastructure. 

The service and documentation will be available next week.

Windows Live Photo API (CTP Refresh with AtomPub end point)

The Windows Live Photo API allows users to securely grant permission (via Delegated Authentication) for a third party web site to create/read/update/delete on their photos store in Windows Live. The Photo API refresh has several things which make it easier and faster for third parties to implement.

• Third party web sites can now link/refer to images directly from the web browser so they no longer need to proxy images, and effectively save on image bandwidth bills.
• A new AtomPub end point which makes it even easier to integrate.

The service and documentation will be available next week.

Quick App Updates

Windows Live Quick Applications provide customizable out-of-the box solutions for specific Web scenarios. Each Quick App is built on Windows Live services and is offered as a source code download for you to use today. You can use these apps as a starting point for your own development, and they will give you a great idea of the sorts of things that you can accomplish on top of the Windows Live infrastructure.

Visit Planner / Contoso Hotel (new Quick App)

Contoso Hotel drives customer affinity using Windows Live Services. Microsoft Silverlight, Virtual Earth, and Windows Live Messenger create an engaging experience that keeps customers coming back (Try it | download the code here | watch the video ).

Tafiti Search Visualization (updated with the Windows Live Messenger Library)

Tafiti Search Visualization uses the Windows Live Messenger Library, Microsoft Silverlight and the Live Search API to provide a compelling search experience for users and allow them to share that experience with their friends (Try it | download the code | watch the video).

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Developers can continue to bet their business on us with confidence. Our priorities are simplifying data portability while keeping users safe and continuing to deliver innovative APIs and tools to help the developer community continue to push the envelope. You can expect to hear more from us in the coming months.

I’m looking forward to talking to many of you in person at MIX next week and you should expect to hear a lot more from Windows Live platform in the weeks ahead.

Best Regards

David Treadwell, Corporate VP of Windows Live Platform Services