Jason Slater Weblog

Recently I had the pleasure of attending a seminar on MSDN: Developing on the Windows Live Platform. Unusually for me I wasn’t late having already been to this venue before and found that parking is a problem. As it was I arrived 90 minutes early and I still couldn’t park - so instead I had to park quite some walk away which gave me a good opportunity to stretch my legs! The seminar was split into two sessions, one held by Martin Parry and the other Mike Ormond - both from Microsoft. I have been to a number of sessions before held by Mike and Martin and they are both pretty confident and accessible in their presentation styles.

Martin started out with a talk about the Windows Live Development Platform drawing particular attention to some of the key points in the terms of use which can be found on the Windows Live web-site at http://dev.live.com/terms/. Particular attention was paid to the break off point of 1 million unique users per month and the two pricing structures, either a fixed unique user price or an ad-sharing scheme. There are a number of caveats so you should check out the terms carefully. It seemed a bit odd to hear Microsoft talking about ad-sharing schemes but perhaps this is some indication as to the future? Martin gave a number of interesting demos during his 45 minutes and touched on areas such as Authentication (using LiveID and integration with Vistas Cardspace), Virtual Earth, Live Contacts, Live Spaces, Live QuickApps, and Live Desktop. An interesting fact about Virtual Earth is that it currently holds 17 Peta Bytes of data. Windows Live looks like it is really coming together and I can start to see how it might be able to offer a viable platform in the future.

Mike sessions covered some programming examples - it is always interesting to see how other people approach their coding and it’s always brave to modify, compile then run a program in front of a large audience - especially when these programs were then being uploaded to Windows Live for running. Mike also talked about Live Search (in particular embedding Live Search using the API and Application ID) and demonstrated some aspects of Silverlight especially streaming with Silverlight - if you haven’t heard of it - it is described as:

“Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform implementation of .NET for building and delivering the next generation of media experiences & rich interactive applications for the Web.”

I wouldn’t dare to say that Silverlight is the Microsoft answer to Flash and Quicktime (perhaps marketing already tried names like Bang, Wallop, Amber Ambience, Fast Span, Blaze and Twinkle!). Silverlight however does seem to help produce some great looking interactive web-sites and the 4GB hosting available is welcome. The API has received a boost with an upgrade from v1 to v1.1 and I imagine that v2 will add more functionality. There are some Silverlight samples at http://silverlight.net/Showcase/

Other interesting links from the day:

http://dev.live.com

http://silverlight.com

http://codeplex.com

http://msdn.co.uk

http://martinparry.com

http://blogs.msdn.com/mikeormond/