June 2008 - LiveSide - Developer Blog

Last month we noted that the BBC and Microsoft will be running a UK Developer event taking place on June 21-22nd. Well, that time is upon us and I will be heading up to London tonight ready for it tomorrow as I will be co-hosting a “bean bag” session about Windows Live development with Luke Smith. Some of the things we will be covering are Delegated Authentication using Windows Live ID, accessing the contacts store using Windows Live Contacts API, some VE goodness, and some shameless plugging for LiveNet (which Luke and I wrote)

So who else is going? If you wanted to meet up at the event, feel free to drop me an email (scott@liveside.net), or a message on twitter. I will try and do a little blogging about the event while it’s going on, but depends on how much time I get.

This article gives a simple introduction to Silverlight Streaming that will allow you to turn your own video content into a Silverlight Streaming application ready for you to place on your website or blog using Silverlight Streaming plug-in for Expression Encoder to publish to your Silverlight Streaming account.

This article uses Expression Encoder 2 and the Silverlight Streaming Publishing Plugin for Expression Encoder 2.

The basic steps are:

• Encode and Upload to Silverlight Streaming
• Place Silverlight video on your Website

Over at dev.live.com they have announced the release of the Web Page Error Toolkit which “allows you to display custom error messages with search results that generated from relevant keywords.” From the Live Search dev blog:

For large web sites with extensive amounts of content, 2 to 10 percent of traffic is looking for pages that either don’t exist or have been moved. Most web servers return a generic 404 error page or a sitemap when a user’s desired page cannot be found. These unhelpful pages often result in a dead end for users.

With Microsoft’s Web Page Error Toolkit, you can create dynamic 404 pages that contain customized error messages along with search results seeded with relevant keywords to help your users move past the missing page and find the information they need.

The Toolkit is a customizable ASP.net application that replaces the default error page on your IIS server. The Toolkit enables you to use Live Search (or any search engine) to return results for the specified domain and locale, control the number of results returned on your page, choose whether to offer spelling corrections, and customize your error message.

You also have the option of choosing from several keyword extraction strategies that are included with the install, or providing your own implementation.

And a quick example of what happens from the dev.live post:

Typical 404 Error Page

Dynamic 404 Error Page

You can download the Toolkit from Microsoft Downloads

In my previous post, I mentioned that the Live Writer SDK had been updated as well as Live Writer itself. In this post I will show you how to build a couple of quick plugins that use the new APIs, but first, what’s changed?

The big thing to note is that all the API calls in the previous version of the SDK are unchanged; the changes have been additions to the SDK. So the main two new additions are two new plugin classes: PublishNotificationHook and HeaderFooterSource. This gives us four types of plugins: ContentSource, SmartContentSource, PublishNotificationHook and HeaderFooterSource. There are also a couple of other new smaller additions, like the TaskServices class that will let you perform a task in the background whilst still keeping the Writer UI in a responsive state.

But this post is going to concentrate on those two new Plugin base classes, which you can see after the jump.