MiX08 and Live.com SDK's

MiX08, finally here and rolling forward

MiX08 is now in motion and a ton of very interesting information is making its way out. If you happen to have two hours to kill I highly recommend viewing the Keynote given by Ray Ozzie, Dean Hachamovitch, and Scott Guthrie.

Some of the Keynote highlights include:

• Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 that has support for .NET 2.0 CLR in a download less then 5 megabytes
• IE 8.0 beta 1 that as you can imagine has a whole set of improvements (some controversial)
• Expression Studio 2 Beta that continues to evolve this platform for designers to create rich experiences using WPF

Live.com SDK's

While much of Live.com development tools and SDK's have been out for some time now I think its also important to highlight in this blog post.

Live.com is a very strategically important platform in Microsoft's vision for the web and this can be seen in an extensive suite of SDK's available for us developers to build on top of. I have said this before: Microsoft is now about building platforms and communities first, and concrete products second.

Here are just some of the things you can start prototyping today in the Live.com toolkit of SDK's and tools:

• Silverlight Stream SDK that allows you to post your Silverlight content and let Microsoft host it for free. (As long as you don't go over some relatively reasonable bandwidth and disk space usage caps)
• Virtual Earth SDK that allows you to create map driven experiences on the web
• Windows Live ID SDK that allows you to create login mechanisms powered by a common Live ID that many people already have
• Windows Live Contact SDK that allows you to build social networks using peoples exist contact data stored in Live ID services such as Messenger or Hotmail (Note that the user still retains the ultimate keys to this information)
• Messenger SDK that allows you to build your own Instant Messaging experiences (wow... to me this is very exciting)
• Live Search SDK that allows you to integrate Live Search into various web scenarios
• Alerts SDK that allows you to integrate with Alert Notifications services and go well beyond the interfaces currently provided by Microsoft for what is possible with Alerts
• Windows Spaces SDK that allows you to integrate with the various API's made available by spaces such as Blog API's, General API's, Social Networking API's, Photo API's, and more
• Web Gadget SDK that allows you to create Web Gadgets for Live Spaces
• Windows Live Photo SDK that allows you access to the photo storage system provided by Live Photo Gallery
• Admin Center SDK that allows you to control the Windows Live Admin Center through a web service API
• Application Based Storage SDK that allows you to store documents, photos and data in the "Cloud" (Do I smell Amazon S3 competition coming? this does feel like a step in that direction)
• Windows Live Writer SDK that allows you to extend the Live Writer platform with plug-ins
• Agents SDK that allows you to create an interactive experience with your users or customers through messenger that is powered by voice synthesis technology and task automation (Is this Microsoft Bob in Messenger? Hmm)
• Live Tools and Controls for Visual Studio that allows developers using Visual Studio to easily integrate Live.com services into their websites by using the control model they are very familiar with

and trust me there is more, so check it out for yourself: http://dev.live.com/ (or this link that also seems to have a lot of resources)

This is an exciting time to be a developer, lets start building Web 3.0 (or whatever version we are up to)