Thanks to all of you who attended my presentation yesterday on Live Services and the Live API - hope you had as much fun as I did.  Here are my follow up links:

General

If you just want the presentation go here, but if you want to learn more about Windows Live development visit http://dev.live.com.  I showed off the the Windows Live Quick Apps (Contoso Bicycle Club, Cotoso University, Contoso ISV, and AdventureWorks Resort) can be found on CodePlex.  Also, if you are getting more serious about developing Live applications, you should consider taking a look at the Visual Studio Tools for Live.

Virtual Earth

If you want to learn more about Virtual Earth visit the developer center and in particular the Virtual Earth Interactive SDK.  A great example of the usage of Virtual Earth are the radar maps on http://www.weather.com.  I showed off integrating in some GeoRSS feeds from MIT into a map and also showed a demo of a modified Club Site Starter Kit.

Live ID

The Live ID discussion was very lively and interesting.  I showed you the sample from the Live ID Client SDK and the Live ID Web SDK.

Live Contacts and Photos

Although we didn't do much in the way of demo we also talked a bit about Live Contacts and Live Photos.  There is a great blog posting you should visit if you are interested in Live Contacts.

Live Search

We also discussed the ability to add search to your site including the AJAX based client control and the ability to use the Interactive SDK to handle queries programmatically.

Live Messenger and Live Agents

One of the more interesting discussions we had was around Live Messenger and Live Agents.  I showed how to create a control you could drop onto a web page to embed IM communication purely through HTML.  I also showed some example agents that were pretty interesting.  If you would like to add them to your Live Messenger, search for the contact smarterchild@hotmail.com and encarta@botmetro.net.  As part of that discussion we also talked about Live Alerts.

Silverlight Streaming

I also did a quick demo that showed off embedding Silverlight Streaming applications into your web page.  There are instructions for packaging up your application for Silverlight Streaming, but I also recommend looking at the Expression Media Encoder if you are specifically looking at media.  I also really like the <iframe> method of embedding the application in your Silverlight applications in about any web page.

My team and I have been putting together an event that should be a lot of fun.  From Tim Heuer's blog:

miss the days of devdays?  me too.  my team is trying to bring a little of that spark back!  joe shirey on my team has organized a full-day of developer and architect goodness.  we'll be hosting two events, one in the phoenix, arizona metro area and one in the denver, colorado metro area.  here's the gist:

 

keynote: microsoft patterns and practices is being shipped in to talk about what they've produced and the logic behind it!

 

developer track :

• exposing and consuming data using the microsoft stack ( rob bagby ): take a look at the ado.net entity framework, linq and the ado.net data services (project 'astoria').
• office as a developer platform (tim heuer): didn't know you could easily write office applications using managed code?  let me show you how easy it is and what visual studio 2008 has done to enable this and make it even easier.
• what is new in visual basic 9 ( beth massi ): that's right.  beth massi -- if you are a vb'er, you've no doubt heard the name from the vb team.  we convinced her that she needed to be a part of this and she agreed!  come learn from beth all the new goodness that is VB9: xml literals, object initializers, anonymous types, extension methods, lambda expressions and some wicked intellisense improvements!

architect track :

• why user experience matters: face it, developers are not good at defining user interfaces and thus it is often an aspect that is left out.  let's discuss the reason this needs to change and how attention to the user experience affects application adoption.
• agile development at microsoft: the team from patterns and practices will discuss how they have fully adopted agile methods in their development team and their learnings over the years.
• the Windows Live platform: think windows live is just virtual earth?  think again!  come hear about the services available to you as service-based building blocks that microsoft has exposed for your use!

this is going to be a great day and a must-see event.  it is completely free to attend.  come hang out with us.  we will also have a couple of surprises throughout the day and some fun stuff to show as well.

 

register for your event today:

 

PHOENIX 29 JAN REGISTER HERE

 

DENVER 31 JAN REGISTER HERE

 

do not miss out on this opportunity to hear from some locals as well as some people we are dragging out from redmond and the product teams!

Thanks to all of you who attended the Phoenix MSDN Power Series Event on 12/20.  The slides will be posted via MSDN Events and I will provide links to them once they are live.  A couple of other items for those of you that attended.

Office as a Platform Session

• If you want to know more about server side generation of documents, there is a good article on MSDN about it.  I have also posted the code I used in the demo here.  To get it to work, you will want to unzip the contents to a directory and open it using the "Open Web Site..." functionality in VS.NET.  This demo should work in both VS.NET 2005 and 2008 as long as you have installed .NET Fx 3.0.  I also had a question about what reference you need to add if you want to use System.IO.Packaging in your solutions - it is WindowsBase.
• If you are interested in the part of the talk where I modified Word 2007, you can check out my video on an earlier posting to see the walkthru.  I have also posted my demo code that wires up the UI to a database here.  If you download that code, you will need to have the Northwind sample database installed (it doesn't come with SQL 2005 samples) and you will need to modify the app.config file to point to the appropriate server.  Also, you will need Word 2007 and VS.NET 2008 since I used Linq to perform the database interactions.  The sample Word document is enclosed in the zip file.
• In both of my demos, I used Word Content Controls to bind the data to the document.  If you are interested in building out your own Word Documents with bound content controls, I recommend downloading and installing the Word Content Control Toolkit. This tool enables quick drag and drop to wire up your custom XML to your content controls in Word.

Software + Services

• If you want to know more about what Microsoft is doing in the Software + Services arena you can check out the website.
• Benny who did part of the presentation has a nice writeup here.

The Windows Live Platform

• As I mentioned in my presentation, you can find out just about anything about the Windows Live Platform from a developer perspective at http://dev.live.com.  If you are curious about the licensing model, select the topic you are interested in, and then select the Terms of Use.

I hope that you found at least one or two nuggets of information during the day and as always, please feel free to contact me if you want to provide me more detailed feedback.

Just a public thanks to Daren May of EMC for the fantastic presentation on Software Factories yesterday.  I thought Daren covered a lot of ground in a very short time but was able to convey why software factories are valuable and how to get started using them.  He also made me wish I had a British accent so I could sound more intelligent.  I will be posting his presentation here later today.

A couple of links of interest from the session.

• You should visit the Microsoft Patterns and Practices site if you are interested in adopting one of the Software Factories built by Microsoft or if you want to create your own factory.  You might also poke around and see some of the other guidance and application building blocks produced by Patterns and Practices while you are browsing their site. 
• If you want to play with the Live Mapping functionality you should try out the Interactive SDK.  The GeoRSS feeds that I used during the session were found on MIT's site.
• WebGuide is the "Slingbox" functionality for Windows Media Center/Vista Ultimate/Vista Home Premium/Windows Home Server that I showed.
• I also showed how to use Expression Media Encoder with the publishing add-in to publish my content directly to Silverlight Streaming and put on my blog using the iframe method.  The video on my blog was encoded with Windows Media Encoder using the screen capture functionality (note that you have to install the 32 bit version to get the screen capture functionality if you are using a 64 bit operating system). 
• Finally, I recommended you take a look at Windows Home Server.  Might be a nice gift for your spouse this holiday season.

Again, thanks to all that made it out yesterday for the session.

UPDATE:

• The Webguide website mentioned above was down the last couple of days - it appears to be up now.
• Daren passed along his materials from the presentation, the following links will take you to:
  • SmartClientDevelopmentSolution1.zip – this is the SCSF solution which has the tree in the left hand nav
  • EMC.Guidance.Data.zip – contains the guidance package that builds the enum from the database
  • EMC.Bugz.Server.zip – a Repository project and web service application that surfaces the bugs and projects for the bugz app
  • MSDNDemo.zip – the guidance package I created during the demo that includes the customized wizard.
  • Software Factories.zip – the presentation (with the fixed link)

There are a couple of events that are coming up that are worth noting...

Visual Studio 2008 Installfest - you can find out more information on Tim Heuer's blog.

The end of the year brings about a time of celebration.  It is a time to embrace friends, family and the RTM of Visual Studio 2008 and Fx 3.5.  Please join us at our holiday installfest to celebrate on December 12, 2007 at 6:00 PM.  The fest will be hosted at the beautiful  Marriott Denver Tech Center.We will have food drinks, demos and some great giveaways. Best of all, every attendee will receive a fully licensed release version of VS 2008 (to be mailed at a later date).

MSDN Masters Series in Denver on Software Factories - you can register here.

Have you ever created a software framework or tools to take care of the repetitive tasks on your projects?  If you have, you created a form of a software factory.  Microsoft’s patterns and practices team has focused on developing a set of software factories for many common types of development: Smart Clients, Web Clients, Mobile Clients, and Web Services.  These factories are excellent to use as is, but can also be extended with your own customizations to suit your specific situation. 

This session will take a deeper look at what constitutes a software factory and the tools used to create and modify a software factory.  Additionally, we will take a cursory look at each of the software factories created by Microsoft and take a deep dive into the Smart Client Software Factory with examples of how to get started and use a foundation that is well documented and thoroughly tested.
This month's presenter is Daren May of EMC. EMC Corporation is the world's leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions.

Hope to see you at one of the events.

If you happen to be in the Phoenix area on December 20th there is an MSDN event taking place.  The morning consists of developer focused topics including Visual Studio 2008, Astoria, and Silverlight.  You can register for the morning event at this link.  The afternoon is focused on architecture topics and includes Software + Services, Windows Live Platform, and Office Business Applications (which I am presenting).  The afternoon event registration is located at this link.  Hope to see you there.

I am hosting an afternoon MSDN event around Silverlight in our Microsoft offices on October 29th from 12:30pm to 4:30pm.  If you are interested you can register here.  This session will cover the basics of Silverlight, using Silverlight with ASP.NET and AJAX, and media integration.  Our friends from Statera will be delivering these sessions.