Windows Live Chronicles

Thanks to the work of the Live Search Selection Team we now have full access to all the Fodor’s Travel Guides through our Book Search & new Travel Instant Answer.

Fodor’s books are now available in the Live Book Search.  There are approximately 120 titles in the series, covering most high-interest destinations.

- Tx, Maggie, Product Manager, Windows Live

So, where are you heading next? :)

http://www.live.com

This update is mainly a UI change.  Features are reorganized to enhance usability and at the same time, I notice a quite dramatic improvement in PLT1/2 load times.. maybe it's my perception :)?

I'll edit this post if I get more update from the search team,

virtualawrence, thanks for the reminder and I owe you one:)  I actually missed a few updates/announcements on the Live Maps front as I was swarmed by the signinandwin campaign.  My apologies to Maggie, PM for Maps, who has been feeding me updates continually. 

April 1st - Wordpress plug-in to Virtual Earth (yes I've been missing updates for Maps THAT far)

I’m very excited to announce a new plug-in for Wordpress blog sites which allow bloggers to insert Virtual Earth maps inside a Wordpress Blog (Beta).

This plug-in is compatible with Windows Live Writer (when you use Writer to insert a post in Wordpress) , it’s mean when you insert a maps from Writer to a Wordpress post, the plug-in become the maps to a Virtual Earth Map instead of a static picture.

You can download plug-in from :

www.vivelive.com/wordpress/wp_livemaps_2_11_2_3.zip

www.vivelive.com/wordpress/wp_livemaps_2_5.zip  (wordpress new version)

-  Juan Antonio Roncero Martín - LIVE product Manager | Microsoft Spain

April 23rd  - Bird Eye View Launched!

Our Local experience on Live Maps has just launched today,  when you go to Live Maps and do a business search – click on any results and you’ll see the new Local Search experience.  This is a pretty cool user experience and we are now able to give user more in depth information about the business that they are searching for.  Feel free to try it out and let me know if there is any question!

An example:

http://maps.live.com/localsearch/Default.aspx?what=pizza&where=Toronto%2C%20Ontario%2C%20Canada&mkt=en-ca&FORM=LLDP

As a separate note – the long waited Bird’s Eye imagery is also launched.  !reas included are ~

Canada:

Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, Victoria, Edmonton,Vancouver.

- Maggie, Windows Live Product Manager, Canada

I’m pleased to announce that the WL platform team has just released another application to help our users communicate in the online world.  This latest release is a instant messaging application on Facebook that leverage our Windows Live Messenger IM Control SDK.  All Facebook users could take advantage of this Microsoft branded application for free today, allowing them to connect with their Facebook friends on Windows Live Messenger. 

How does this work?

After you add the application to your facebook profile, you will see the following on your profile page.  When your friends go into your facebook profile, they could start an IM conversation with you by simply clicking onto the chat window, sign in using their WL ID, and their message will be delivered to your actual messenger client. 

Communication is limited between the two parties within the session and other people who visit chris’s profile would not be able to see our chat history.  Conversation is limited to text-only and no emoticons, no video, nor any other interactions such as winks, games, etc.  As you can see below as well, you’ll be able to add the profile owner to you Windows Live Messenger contact list directly from the app. 

Add it today! Be a fan! Spread the words! Start IM-ing!

These days have been crazy for me.  I just finished my master degree, began our 2009 planning process, finishing up on the sign in and win promos, prepping for energizeIT...  anyway, I'm glad that the first post after a month is to announce the 1st set of winners for signinandwin.

The bad thing about contest is that it's very hard to find the right person to claim the prize!  Call them up, get them to believe in you that it is not a scam, get them to sign the contest release form...  that's why it takes so long to release the winners.  Anyway, check it out at http://signinandwin.ca or go to the messenger tab and click on the "winners" link at the bottom!  Hopefully your name is on it!  More winners coming soon!

This is authentic, not a spoof, not a scam, not a spam (I hope).  Canada has launched a campaign that Windows Live Messenger users could win $1000 a day.  I'm not a lawyer so don't pick on my wordings, but you can learn more from here, http://www.signinandwin.ca.

The idea is simple, log into Messenger, click on the tab, and you are eligible for the draw. 

This is real, we will send you the prize.  What are you waiting for, click on the tab and sign up :)

Tell your friends about it too!

Invite2Messenger has come to Canada!

What is it?

A portal that allows users to access all their contact lists from different social networking sites, and invite them to join Messenger or add them to their contact lists.  You can try it out today at http://www.invite2messenger.net .  Currently we support Facebook only, but our plan is to expand this list to Hotmail, bebo, LinkedIn, Hi5 and Tagged. 

Sample Invitation

Start inviting! :)

OK I haven't been slacking off.  I forgot to charge my laptop last night and I couldn't blog during the session.

Encoder V2

One of the sessions I really looked forward to.  I've been playing with Encoder during V1 and found it really cooler, in fact, much cooler than blend / designer mostly due to the fact that it provides a lot of out of the box video encoding capabilities.  I got some sneak peek of Encoder V2 through various sessions yesterday but today I got a much more indepth discussion only focused on Encoder.

Update since V2:

Partial rebuild.  One big problem in V1 is that the re-encoding process may take a long time.  This is very bad especially when you only changed a really small thing and watched Encoder to recompress everything.  Now this is improved such that only the thing you changed is being recompressed.  If you only change, say the header / meta data, you won't need to recompile at all, neat!

Script Command.  This was briefly discussed is the previous sessions as well.  But this session really showcased the power of script command.  From providing closed caption to breaking chapters, all the way to firing up advanced Silverlight Controls (like the interactive polls in the demo), all of these could be controlled through script commands. 

Templates.  More advanced template editing.  Direct hook up with Blend to allow easy editing of templates.  Encoder will also ship some SL2 templates when SL2 becomes officially available.

Developing Rich Application with IE 8

More and more IE8 sessions :) 

First, IE 7 vs IE 8 performance, not only we increased the number of parallel connections, the parsing won't be stopped by script tags anymore.

Second, dev tools.  I talked a lot about it yesterday so I'm not going to reiterate.  One thing though is that debugging is associated with each tab / session, not with the entire IE8.  Not sure if this is big for you but this is certainly very big for me. 

Thirdly, HTML5 and DOM Storage,

-Connection Event fired up by IE [Event is raised whenever IE8 cannot get pass proxy]

-Asynchronous r/w access to local DOM storage.  Each domain has 10MB and no public storage.  this is a simple key-value pair in a local file but there's no limit in each key-value pair.

Fourth, XDR (cross domain request) and XDM (cross document messaging)

Last but not least ARIA, Accessible Rich Internet Application.

this is the least known to me in all the topics.  Basically from how I understand it it is a standard to mark up your webpage to enhance accessibility such as Screen Reader and other tools.  this is a new standard specifically focused on dynamic and scripted web content.

I can't bring myself to make notes of it.  Watch it yourself NOW.

Integrating Silverlight with Media files

This track goes in depth on some features in SL2 and Expression Encoder beta 2.  A few things that really amazed me is the seamless integration between streaming online media and playing local media files within one single app.  The second part that I find extremely interesting is the support of PlayReady.  there are also more information about IIS7 bitrate throttling and webplaylist.  If you are interested, read on.

IIS 7 Media Pack Highlights

Bitrate throttling - control how much of the media is sent to clients.  Burst of content is sent in the initial load times but subsequent content will be sent at a much lower bitrate.  This is great to save server bandwidth because statistically most people only watch the 20% of the content before the close the video.  (Don't ask me about the validity of the stat), so server doesn't need to send all these unseen data wasting bandwith.

Web playlist - Client side playlist with server-side state.  Client cannot alter state.  Client seek or skip entry.  This is very useful when you want to stream pre-rolls or advertising within you video..

Now we are onto ads, Silverlight, when combined with Encoder, actually supports ad targetting as well.  Keying on the sessionID, servers can server different prerolls or ads based on the different videos being played.  Not fancy enough?  It is also possible to targetting to a specific set of frames within a video using Expression Encoder 2 and the marker feature.  Server can associate metadata with a particular frame implement script commands.  Script command is just 3 string values :Time, Type and Command.  The Type and Command is a key value pair that client can read fro the video and fire off an event.  using myMediaElenect.MarkerReached  listener, and can check Type.and Text from the marker. 

In terms of PlayReady , online playback can be DRMed (PlayReady).  server can send a marker to client indicating the file needs a license, and client will contact license erver and exchange key.  If it is licensed the video will play.  Silverlight 2 doesn't support any offline DRM media request.

Coming up... Creating Rich, Dynamic User Interfaces with Silverlight 2 Controls