Communications - Messenger, Presence, Alerts and Activities

Communications - Messenger, Presence, Alerts and Activities

• James McClutcheon
• @ 1:30pm

Overview

• Why Live Messenger?
• Compelling way for people to stay in touch
• 300+ Million Users (world’s largest)
• 30 Billion contact relationships
• #1 messaging service in most markets
• Grow audience and user base
• Increase stickiness of your site

Build Rick Social Apps

• Reach out to contacts
• Add new contacts
• Show what users are doing on your site
• Let users interact with rich messaging

Demo

• Tafiti.mslivelabs.com

Communications within the Live Framework

• P2P
• Notifications
• Presence

Windows Live Messenger Library

• Enables third-party sites to seamlessly add instant messaging capabilities with Windows Live Messenger
• Client side library helps build presence enabled Web applications
• Messenger Library applications can be built in JavaScript or C# (using Script#)
• Sign-in with Windows Live ID; sign-in control hosted by Microsoft
• Interact with site visitor or other IM users

Messaging and Presence

• Build a custom Messenger experience
• All of the core Windows Live Messenger features are available
• Application Messages and Custom presence allow value-added features

What’s new in Messenger Library 2.5?

• JavaScript URL is http://www.wlmessenger.net/api/2.5/messenger.js
• Contact Properties
• Endpoint Names
• Show/Hide Control
• All collections expose item accessors
• Firefox 3.0 support

User requirements

• Windows Live ID is required
• End users must grant permission to each web site that hosts a client library application
• Browser support

Messenger Library Development with Messenger Library

• Sign-in
• User Object
• Channel and Privacy pages

Manage Conversations

• Monitor the presence of the current users and the user’s contacts
• Iterate through each contact on the user’s contact list

Changing a User Presence

• user the set_status function of the presence object for the user
• _user.get_presence.set_status(Microsoft.Live.Messenger.PresenceStatus.online);

Live Services – Presence API

• Show a user’s presence
• User must give permission to share presence and receive messages
• HTTP based API
• Returns JSON or an image
• Can be used together with IM Control
• Supported browsers…

Messenger Control

• Navigate to http://settings.messenger.live.com/applications/websettings.aspx
• Select the Allow websites to see your Messenger status and send you messages check box and click Save
• Under Web Settings, click Create HTML
• Copy the HTML and paste it into your Web page

Inviting Users

• Add a link to the signup page.
• Users goes to WLM settings page
• Redirect back to the web site
• Use the users ID with the IM control

Alerts SDK

• SOAP Protocol
• Programmatic Integration
  • Add/Remove group
  • Publication sign-up
  • Subscribe/Unsubscribe end-user
  • Deliver message
  • Inquire about user subscription
  • Inquire about available groups

Security

• Partner Identification
  • Each Alerts Partner is provided with a unique PIN and password
  • The PIN and password are required in all message transmissions to Alerts
• Partner IP
  • Alerts validate each request against a specified list of legal IP addresses. This list of addresses must be supplied to Alerts and verified before the site can operate in Production mode.

Windows Live Messenger Activities

• A Messenger Activity is a Web application page that provides an interactive experience for Windows Live Messenger users
• Activities can be multi-user applications take advantage of the Messenger communication infrastructure
• Users start Activities from the Games or the Activities buttons in a conversation window, or externally from a webpage.

Windows Live Messenger Activities – Getting Started

• Start with a new or existing HTML page. The HTML page will be displayed within the Windows Live Messenger client
• The largest window that the Windows Live Messenger client can display is 500 by 500 pixels
• Event handlers and functions are placed in the scripting part of the document
• Output and information are displayed in the body part of the document

Activity Object Model

• Channel Object
• Error Object
• FileInfo Object
• Messenger Object
• User Object
• Users Collection

Event Handling

• When a Windows Live Messenger Activity is running, the Windows Live Messenger script engine is firing events to the application
• In order for two instances of the application to communicate with each other, appropriate event handlers must be defined. For example, if the SendData method is used to send a string from one instance to the other, an OnDataReceived event handler must be defined to receive the string
• Some commonly used event handlers are: …

Get Started…

• Messenger Development on Windows Live Dev http://dev.live.com/messenger
• Activity API SDK http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa751024.aspx