Today Microsoft released the November CTP of the Windows Live Tools. All the details and downloads are available here, I’ve spotted some additional write ups here and here.
With guidance from some great Microsoft PM’s, Koji Kato and Vikas Ahuja and quality assurance by a number of exceptional testers, I was fortunate enough to be aLive and contribute to the development of the Live Contacts and SilverlightStreamingMedia ASP.Net controls. This will be the first in a series in which I will go into detail about what’s in and what’s not in the November CTP and possibly share with you (of what I can) what’s up next. This series will first cover the Contacts control and then we will move on to the Silverlight Streaming control. While in this first series, if you have questions about the SilverlightStreamingMedia control, please don't hesitate to ask.
Most of you may be familiar with the existing Live Contacts control and I won’t go into the details about that control, as there is already sufficient documentation about it available here. So the first question you may be asking yourself then is: “Why would Microsoft build the same control?”. The answer is simple, “Developer Experience”, the existing contacts control takes a little time to setup and JavaScript is your only option for programmability. So the goal here is to provide developers with an out of the box setup, a managed server-side API and an enhanced client-side JavaScript API.
I my next post, soon to follow, I’ll first discuss the architecture of the control, that will give us a good foundation to start from.
See you then…