Angus Logan's Blog

A few people from the Live Services team are going to LeWeb’08 and we thought – lets do something crazy! Lets give out 30GB Live Mesh accounts.

As James mentions:

To claim your 30GB storage on Live Mesh please stop by the Live Mesh booth in the Microsoft zone and register with either myself (James Senior), Angus Logan or Jeff Hansen.

Attendees will also be getting exclusive access to Live Mesh for Windows Mobile and Mac, again stop by the booth for more info.

Giddy up! See you there!

I’m at LeWeb next week and then heading over to London for a couple of days

One of the things going down will be a Blogger Gathering.

Unfortunately new kid on the block, James Senior (he blogs like a mofo) , at Live Services @ HQ got dissed from the invitation even though he’s coming.

Do you think we should let him come with us?

If you'd like to join us please edit the wiki to add your name - that way we'll have a good idea of how many people to expect.

Where: The Coach and Horses pub, 29 Greek Street, Soho, London W1V 5LL    

When: 11th December from 6pm to 8pm (and onwards for anyone that fancies it)

Who'd enjoy this? Anyone who's interested in discussing cloud computing with two of the leaders from Microsoft

more info

Follow the link for the Live Framework Webcast on the December 8th 8AM PST (Facebook Event):

Live Services would like to invite you to join the first webcast event for Live Framework (Live fx). During the session, you will have a chance to hear from the Microsoft engineering team which developed Live Framework. The session will be held from 8am PST to 10am PST on Dec 8th, 2008.

 

Agenda

The agenda for the session is

8:00am – 8:30am: Introduction to Live Framework and Resources

8:30am – 8:45am: Live demonstration of sample applications development.

8:45am-10:00am: Open Q&A.

 

If there are any questions in-depth technical/coding questions which you would like us to cover as part of Q&A, you can post them in advance on this thread. We will try to cover them during Q&A.

 

What would you want to hear from Live Services team?

Please post your list of topics that you want to cover in Webcast series to this thread.

 

Joining and viewing online Webcast

You can join the online webcast using any standard browser here: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/join?id=LiveFx_Dec8&role=attend

 

Alternatively, you can dial-in to listen to audio using these numbers and participant pass-code.

 

Toll Number :	BELGIUM   +32-3-400-2811  DENMARK   +45-7014-0278  FRANCE   +33-1-70-70-62-75  GERMANY   +49-69-2222-7227  HONG KONG  +852-2286-5645 IRELAND   +353-1-247-5443  JAPAN   +81-3-5539-5167  SWITZERLAND   +41-44-580-6291  USA   +1-203-480-8000
Toll Free / Freephone :	AUSTRALIA  1-800-202-713 BRAZIL   0800-8911983  NEW ZEALAND   0800-448-997  USA   866-500-6738
Participant Passcode:	1957172

I posted on the dev.live.com main newsfeed the end of the Photo API and the App Storage community technology previews!

All of the feedback you provided was awesome and it helped shape the Live Framework.

We don’t have an exact schedule as to when a new Photo API will be available however this is an interesting scenario we want to enable.

Photos API and App Storage API CTP Ending

Just a quick note that we will be winding down our Community Technology Preview of the Windows Live Spaces Photo API and the Windows Live Application Based Storage API in the next couple of days and we will be turning off those API endpoints.

The Photos API CTP especially has been extremely useful for us, as we learned a ton about the functionality developers want and previewed our first AtomPub endpoint – this AtomPub endpoint drove some of the thinking around the Live Framework. But the time has come for these CTPs to end. In the future, we will be back with another Photo API, but we don’t have the exact schedule yet.

Community Technology Previews are designed to shape the technology by giving developers early access to a technology to allow them to “kick the tires” and provide us valuable feedback. CTP releases explicitly do not allow for use in production-style environments (see terms). This allows us to get our offering right before we have customers bet their businesses on us. With the development of the Live Framework and the revamped release of Windows Live services, the APIs need an overhaul to provide a consistent developer and user experience for accessing private data and related metadata.

One last thing, I want to explicitly call out the work we did with eye.fi. Allowing their customers to upload photos to Spaces in a preview state really drove a lot of the key learnings around the Photo API – eye.fi have been a great partner.

Published Monday, December 01, 2008 6:28 PM by alogan

At PDC there was so much noise and I think one of the things which is huge and didn’t get a ton of focus were Mesh-enabled Web Applications – personally these are my favorite feature/game changer.

Thankfully, the owner of this area of the Live Framework, Arash Ghanaie-Sichanie wrote a great post on the topic – a few notes below:

• build an app once and run the same app on multiple platforms
• websites build rich clients to extend their experiences to devices and desktop
• Occasionally Connected experience
• synchronized storage

Check out the post.

This site came across the internal wire, its in Italian so I dont really know what its about, but its a way cool customized Messenger experience using the Windows Live Messenger Library.

Pretty neat.

Now the Messenger client (at least the beta) has multiple points of presence you aren’t signed out of the client

Mmmmm emoticons :)

They are allowing the person doing the chatting to invite their friends to this site (easy user acquisition)

Tabbed conversations – nice!

Wouldn’t it be cool if i could just grant permission for www.earthclassmail.com to scan and write my mail into my mesh, bonus points if they could also structure it in some type of XML.

That way, any program could write an adapter to my mesh:

• add a reminder to my calendar;
• import it to my MS Money
• upload it to www.Mint.com or www.wesabe.com
• share it with my accountant

for now i have to resort to scanning and dropping in outlook.

Danny Thorpe wrote about this a while ago… time for someone to step up and do it!

If anyone knows the equivalent of Earth Class Mail in Australia I’m all ears.

Mobile TechCrunch just posted the new ability to program your Tivo from your phone – reminded me of a demo our Media Center team created for the PDC, which I think is cooler.

We meshified an MCE making it possible to see the electronic program guide, choose what should be recorded from either a web site, client (Mesh enabled web application) or phone.

Watch the video (Vimeo or Silverlight Streaming)

Sondre Bjellås has been posting on Mesh and Live Framework quite a bit.

One of his posts really jumped out at me, the Flickr2Mesh application he wrote.

Its fairly straight forward code, just downloads all of your Flickr photos to your hard drive at a specific resolution.

But if you think about combining this with Live Mesh on your phone, or the Live Desktop, or the Live Mesh client for Windows or Mac – suddenly you get access to all of your photos on any of your devices.

Very cool.

Check out the full post here (source code included)

Over at the Live Framework blog Kevin has given details of the update for the tech preview.

Version numbers for this release

• Live Framework Developer Sandbox: 0.9.3519.1
• Live Framework Client: 0.9.3519.1
• Live Framework SDK: 0.9.3519.1

and the key updates are:

• A new Live Framework Client (i.e. local Live Operating Environment)
• Enhancements for updating Mesh-enabled Web Applications
• a bunch of bug fixes

Read the full details

Since I’m working in Australia until January (except a week in France) plugging into all the team meetings is super important.

Today I finally convinced my team to use the RoundTable we have in the meeting rooms.

This is a screenshot of the Live Meeting – full panorama and the video on the left changes to whoever is talking.

when I start talking (or Nicolas in Silicon Valley) talks we need to manually flip over to our web cams.

Way cool!

There are a few things you need to do to get started with the Live Framework.

• setup a demo LIve ID (recommended not to use your real Live ID because its a CTP and you may run demos or share your code. This is only necessary if you run demos)
• redeem the token
• install the local Live Operating Environment
• Download the SDK
• Install the Live Framework Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio

Watch the screen cast below (new window or blip.tv or download)

Click To Play

I didn’t even know the STUG existed but it is cool. "About Tablet Tips: Tablet Tips is an informational video podcast produced by students at the University of Louisville's Speed School of Engineering to help educate students and faculty about the use of Tablet PCs in an academic setting"

One their show (link & below) they outline some online backup and sync tools and talk quite a bit about Live Mesh.

Much better hearing how cool Mesh is from Jared instead of me :)

A while ago my sister got me onto MapMyRun. I don’t run seriously and because I always run wierd routes in different cities I like to know how far I went.

Updating MapMyRun tonight it offered to publish my training long to some of my favorite news feeds, Twitter and Facebook (coming soon).

I love this! But it could be cooler. Imagine if I could choose to expose my Windows Live Messenger presence using the IM Control and people could search for a route, and then IM with the person who submitted it to see if they want to go running together... way cool.

The only downside is I have to give them my password as they don’t use some type of delegated authentication (like OAuth).

sidenote: Interestingly when I was posting my run, twitter was down, this will be a test of MapMyRun's engineering prowess if they drop it on a guaranteed delivery queue so when twitter comes back up my activity appears.

Dare wrote a good post about the Live Framework (is it Microsoft’s GData or something else) but one thing kinda jumped out at me in his summary:

the client-side Live Operating Environment is a technology whose benefits elude me. I admit it is kind of cool but I can't see its utility

I haven’t got much time but luckily this is simple.

Why do you want a local instance of the operating environment running? here are a few quick and dirty bullets:

• SYNC BABY! Sure offline is a benefit, but SYNC is about bringing data closer to devices, you need something which actually executes the sync. (and peer to peer sync)
• Offline access – planes, trains, tube, net connection goes down, you want that data offline.
• Local apps
• Mesh enabled web apps – you need a local host to run the MEWAs
• Other types of apps – the LOE provides a local HTTP server which exposes the resource model so apps can code against it and in the background all the data is sent wherever it needs to be.
• Remote Control – I know this is a bit of a wildcard, but its pretty useful. On Windows boxes you can remote control one of your other devices. pretty neat.

UPDATE: Danny has written much more about why the LOE is great.