With the Mix09 Keynote taking place later today (4pm GMT, watch it live at http://live.visitmix.com/), one of the things that will be shown at Mix is the Live Messenger Web Toolkit. Basically, the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit “enables developers to integrate and enrich their Web-based applications with Windows Live Messenger.”

The documentation for all of this is very nicely viewable on MSDN already, so you can start reading up on it now. I haven’t gone through what’s on offer in too great a detail yet, however there is a “Getting Started Tour” video available that Angus Logan and James Senior have done at (embedded further down) as well as an mslivelabs subsite for it.

Taken from the documentation:

You can integrate with the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit in the following two ways:

• Windows Live Messenger UI Controls: The Windows Live Messenger UI Controls are a set of 16 HTML-based controls that encapsulate the most common scenarios for Web developers. Developers can use an easy XHTML markup scheme and CSS to customize the appearance and behavior of the controls on their Web site without having to write JavaScript code. The use of these UI Controls is recommended for most developers.
• Windows Live Messenger Library: The Messenger Library is a powerful client-side JavaScript library that exposes an object model for integrating with Windows Live Messenger. The use of the library is recommended for advanced developers who are looking to enable custom scenarios that the UI Controls do not support.

The WLML is nothing new to us, as Colin has done a fantastic series on how to use the WLML. Looking forward to seeing what demos are shown using this.

Thanks to mynetx for the tip on this. And remember, if you have any tips for us, email tips{at}liveside.net or use the anonymous tips form.

SL