First of all, welcome to my personal space. I'm not the kind of person that posts his whole life on the internet, but I will however post interesting things about my personal experiences with anything related to the Windows Live Platform. It will mainly be about the new Windows Live Messenger (Activities, Add-ins, Bots) but also about the rest of the Windows Live platform, from a developers point of view.

 

The reason I start this blog now, is because I went to a Windows Live session this week. Of course I had expected that it would be cool, but it was far better then that. I'm really impressed by all the things that were shown, so this is probably going to be a long post, because I have to let you all know about it. I'll start with the beginning...

 

I went to London with 2 of my friends, Yousef El-Dardiry (a.k.a. Juzzi, winner of the Worlds Best App contest and the Gadget Contest) and TheBlasphemer (we call him different in real life ;-)). Of course we first visited some nice places in London, but I will not talk about that too much. At 6.15 PM we met 3 people from the UK at Piccadilly Circus and the 6 of us started searching for the building. When we arrived there, there was a small door in the wall, with a "Windows Live Session" paper on it. Behind the door there were stairs going down, it looked a bit scary there. But it turned out to be a nice basement, with all the people from "Heaven" (the company that organized this session) and of course from Microsoft (the company that... well you know).

 

We were welcomed, we all got a notepad to write things down (I brought my own) and everybody started to talk with others. I immediately got some real life spam, from mister Mess.be (known as Dwergs). After about 15 minutes, the session started.

 

The first speaker was Phil Holden from Microsoft. He talked 15 minutes about the Windows Live products in common. He mentioned them all, and told us what they were planning to improve. He had some great plans, but he didn't mention any release date.

 

About Windows Live Mail he said there just was a major update. The most obvious change was that the ad-bar on the side was removed. Now there is more space for your e-mails, and from a advertisers point of view it was better, because people didn't have to choose what ad they should click, they just see 1 now.

 

Windows Live Messenger has now got 8 million users, in comparison with 210 million users of MSN Messenger 7.5 or earlier versions. They want to have more users on the WLM to have more feedback about the product. He seemed to be really proud about the fact that the latest version starts and signs in way faster than the last few versions.

 

About Live.com he said a lot, because that is at the moment a product that isn't as populair as expected. It turns out to be very difficult to use, especially for beginning computer users. The plan is to gather more users (maybe with advertisement campaigns) and make it easier to use. It should be more obvious how to add new Gadgets, the Drag & Drop will be improved, etc.

 

There's also good news about Windows Live Local, because the images of Europe will be updated very soon. He showed a couple of pictures of London, including a big picture of the London Eye. So it seems like we can finally zoom in very close here in Europe. If I'm correct he said it would start with the UK, and later some other European country's (I'm still hoping they will finally update the Dutch maps).

 

This was the first part by Phil (we will get back to him later) and now Koji Kato started his talk. He is a developer (and he's Japanese as his name implies) for the Windows Live team, and he showed us some demo's to show us how easy it is to integrate the Windows Live platform into your own application (or to integrate your own application into the Windows Live platform).

 

He started with a small talk about the Windows Live developer platform in common. There are developer SDK's available for almost every Windows Live service (Messenger, Spaces, Live.com, Search) and there will be even more in the future.

 

At this point, the really cool demo's started. Koji decided to not only show us the demo's, but also code them on the fly. He started programming a Gadget. It was a very simple gadget to show us the basic code of a gadget. There was pre-written code to speed up this demo, but he explained every line (ok, some lines were explained by: "Don't think about this, without this line it doesn't work, so just add this line") and we got a quick "gadget programming course".

 

The next thing he developed for us, was an activity. For those who don't know what activity's are: the games and other things you can do with your friend in MSN Messenger of Windows Live Messenger are called activity's. I already programmed activity's before (I even won a price in the Worlds Best App contest with it) so I didn't really hear anything new at this part, but I'll blog it down because not everybody might know it. The main activity is just a simple html file, with JavaScript or VBScript in it. To make it work with Messenger, you should make a certain XML file with the URL in it of your activity and some other details. Place that in the right directory, and it will work! When you want to inform the other pc about something, you can just call "SafeSendData(<data>)" and the string <data> will be sent to the other pc. On the other pc an event will be called, and that can do something with the data.

 

Koji also showed us what bots are. He had a nice conversation with the "YellowPages bot". The evening was too short to explain and show how bots are programmed, so he only told us about what you can do with bots. He made 1 big mistake here, by not mentioning the Bot Contest (http://www.robotinvaders.com)! Those who want to develop a bot should definatly take a look at that site! And all the other people too, because bots that have been submitted will be in the gallery on the site. I'm gonna compete for sure, and you might be able to test my first bot within a month or so. I'll post an update here when it is done.

 

After the bots, we went over to Visual Studio 2005 for an example about the Sqlserver and ASP.NET. Koji already had an ASP.NET website communicating with the Sqlserver, and during the session he started to improve that website. At the beginning, you could login with your own name, and upload some images in you photo albums. At the main page of the website a random image was shown. Then Koji started to add a Virtual Earth Map control to the page. The images that were uploaded were in their names already tagged with Longitude / Langitude and Koji used this information to show the pictures on the VE Map. After a few minutes of coding, the front page of the website showed a map of the earth, with al the images on the places were they were taken. A really nice example of the things you can do with the Virtual Earth maps and ASP.NET.

 

Now, Koji opened another program in Visual Studio 2005, a C# program this time. C# is my favorite programming language, I do a lot of things with it, so I didn't expect he would tell me anything that I didn't know (about the things above, I knew about the gadgets, activity's, bots and Virtual Earth). But, this turned out to be one of the most interesting things for me of this session! Koji integrated the MSN Search engine in his application, in about 10 lines of code!! It was a kind of a shock for me that I didn't know this before, and I will definatly use this in my applications! Koji's application was a standard Winforms control with a input text box, a button called "Search" and an output box. He entered "Koji Kato Microsoft" into the text box, and after he pressed search, the results immediately appeared in the output box.

 

Then, Koji did something very cool. He added a "Handwriting" object to his application. He made that before, probably because he used to be member of the Tablet PC team. He integrated that tool in his application very easily, and now he could hand-write the text that would be searched for! And another nice feature, he could move the words, and the words that he placed on top of the input screen were more important for the search then the ones below.

 

After this, we came to a break to eat and drink something. There were a lot of different kind of snacks, I don't know what it was, but it tasted good! I talked with Koji about his presentation and about other things related to the Windows Live platform, and I had nice conversations with other people.

 

Now it was time for Phil again to show us some really nice stuff this time. He introduced us to: Windows Live QnA. QnA (or Q&A) stands for Questions And Answers. People told me it is a bit like Yahoo Answers, but I don't know that service. It is in a very early stage at the moment, and we were one of the first to really see it. The idea is simple: You can ask a question, if the question has been asked before, you see the answer, else the question is posted on the site and other people can give their answers. You can also vote for the answers. After 3 days the question is "closed". You can earn "Kudos" for giving correct answers, and it should be able to use those in the future to get some nice "digital gadgets". The idea is nice, you can build up a giant knowledge base about the world with this, but I don't think it will be populair. It needs a lot of moderating, because I think spammers will find this system soon, and you should always rely on the knowledge of the community. However, we can give it a try and see where it goes, I'll definatly try it as soon as I can use it.

 

At this moment of the session, I thought it couldn't get better. We had so much nice demo's and we had seen so much things. But Phil had again something that surprised us! For most people the following things was the best of the session I think, for me it was one of the best. Phil showed us the new Windows Live Mobile Messenger (got those name from Mess.be, really don't know how they called it, but it's just Windows Live Messenger for your Mobile phone ;-)). The reason this wasn't the best thing for me is because my mobile phone cannot handle this (I've still got a Nokia 3310), but it was really cool to see however. Phil had his laptop (connected to the beamer so we could watch it) signed in on his first account, and he signed in with his mobile phone on his second account. He first typed some messages on his mobile phone, which were showed on the screen. Not very interesting so far. But, then he took a picture of us with his phone, which was immediately sent to the other user (after he clicked Accept on his laptop). It took a few seconds, but then we could see the picture!

 

The next thing he did was recording a sound, and that was sent to the other account as a voice clip, so the other user could play it. He mentioned it would be a nice feature for example when you're driving your car and can't type a whole message, you can always talk to your friends! Note from me: You can better not sign in to messenger when you are driving. The mobile phone doesn't support video yet, neither winks. Phil even discovered a nice feature: Yousef asked if it would vibrate if you sent a nudge and funny enough... it did!

 

The last thing we saw was something that's called "RSS Hub" or something. It hasn't really got a name, this is just how they call it. It is a system that combines different RSS feeds to show the news on 1 page. You can choose what things you want to see, based on Language, Category and Website. They showed us http://xbox360daily.fr/ that is basically the same idea, but then about the XBox360. I wasn't very interested in this, but it can be usefull for some people. I've never seen why RSS is so populair at all... A nice detail is, if you click on the title of an article, the original website is opened, so you will get your clicks and visitors when your RSS feed is in this system...

 

This was the end of the planned session, some questions were asked and everybody stand up to get some more drinks. Together with a few others, I took a closer look to the Windows Live Mobile Messenger. Phil showed us how it looked on his phone, and how he could do certain stuff. It all looks really good, the design and user interface are perfect! I cannot say anything bad about that!

 

There was also a camera to film the whole session, and I was interviewed by Romain Gilbert (from Heaven, the organizer, thanks again Romain!!). I don't know what they will do with the video, but we'll see. It was nice to be able to talk about it with him.

 

At the end of the evening, Phil also gave away 5 VoIP phones! I didn't win one unfortunatly, but I want to say congratulations to the winners ;-). After that, I had a really nice conversation with Koji, and it was really bad we had to leave. We were kind of kicked out the building, because it was too late (actually, it was 11 PM or so). After that, we visited the Big Ben by night, and some other nice London places. The next day we went back to the netherlands, thinking about the great evening we had.

 

I would like to thank Romain Gilbert again for organizing this, together with him the other people from Heaven involved with this (I don't know their names), Phil Holden for showing such cool things and giving away the VoIP phones, Koji Kato for his great demo's and besides that his great enthousiasm, all the other Windows Live developers for the nice conversations we had, Yousef for joining me on this trip, and last but for sure not least, TheBlasphemer for arranging the invitation for me and also joining me on the trip! Thanks to all!

 

If you can't get enough about this after you read this whole story, you can also look to the following websites:

 

http://seb.zero1inc.co.uk/blog/2006/05/17/windows-live-session-2/ (seb's blog)
http://blog.coolz0r.com/2006/05/17/live-dot-com-road-show-london/ (coolz0r's blog)
http://xo.typepad.com/blog/2006/05/windows_live_uk.html (Robert's blog)
http://www.darrenstraight.com/blog/2006/05/16/windows-live-session-uk-2/ (Darren's blog)
http://www.msblog.org/?p=638 (Zack's blog)
http://simonandrews.typepad.com/big_picture/2006/05/microsoft_live_.html (Simon's blog)
http://spaces.msn.com/d3vmax/Blog/cns!73AF9C0F050E35D9!17750.entry (Dev's blog)
http://www.mess.be/ (some short story's about this on the frontpage)

 

http://www.msgweb.nl/forums/showthread.php?tid=338 (Yousef's story)

http://www.messenger-blog.com/?p=192 (TB's story)

http://crossthebreeze.wordpress.com/2006/05/21/windows-live-session-london/ (Kris' blog)