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Scott's "SiteExperts" Place

My little place away from home...


The Live.com team has outdone themselves...July 27 2007
Go check out http://www.live.com. 
 
I expect to see more posts from the team after they get back from some much needed rest.
 
The experience and features have been heavily updated. A few highlights to check out:
  1. Heavily updated look and feel.
  2. Multiple pages to help organize your content. Quickly rename and rearrange your pages (drag and drop them)
  3. Adding content is much easier (and again, just drag an item from the list onto your page)
  4. The coolest updated feature: Search (including extensible macros).  Try the infinite scroller to move through the lists, click on the drop-down to find macros to extend your search experience.
  5. Built in gadgets have an enhanced look and feel.

Explore. I am sure you will find more great stuff.

 

 
Watch my Engineering Great AJAX Experiences Talk...July 27 2007
My presentation from the Mix06 Conference, Lessons from the Trenches: Engineering Great AJAX Experiences is now online:
 
NGW020 - Lessons from the Trenches: Engineering Great AJAX Experiences
Description:
Explore the challenges and lessons learned developing the Windows Live and Gadgets Web client frameworks powering Windows Live, Hotmail (Kahuna beta), Spaces, and more. This technical talk presents design and architectural considerations for building interactive AJAX-like sites. See how componentization, network management, accessibility, page composition, and more impact the design and engineering of your Web application.
 
 (To find other talks, go to the main Mix06 Sessions Page).
 
 

Talking about Gadget devs, come out and play!July 27 2007

I know it has been awhile since I posted.  Tonight we have big news!  MSN Spaces is now Windows Live Spaces. The Windows Live vision is taking shape! In addition to tons of cool improvements (themes, social networking, and more), now Gadgets can be built for Spaces as well as Live.com.  Stay on top of developing for Spaces at the Spaces Platform blog.

One of the best aspects of Gadgets on Spaces is their viral nature.  See a cool gadget on someones space - just click on the + sign and you can quickly add it to your Space. Let the fun begin!

Quote

Gadget devs, come out and play!
 
Admit it. 
 
You've always thought MSN Spaces was pretty cool -- that we did some things right and would work hard to smooth out any rough edges over time.  But, you weren't sure if the Spaces team would ever let developers outside the company party in someone else's space.  Well, a big part of joining the Windows Live family today is support for web gadgets written by anyone including YOU!  Thanks to the great work done on Gadgets to date, you can now write a gadget that works both in Live.com (personalized portal) and Spaces (online expression/identity).  And, it only takes one person adding it to their space for your gadget to become popular -- visito

What we learned building Live.com (or why are we slow)?July 27 2007
Over the last 18 months, we have explored how to build a highly-interactive, customizable, and extensible portal. The first iteration was a simple portal on Start.com. We created various iterations (start.com/1, start.com/2, start.com/3) which have evolved into the first fully extensible portal on Live.com. Today, from Live.com to the Kahuna (Hotmail) beta to MSN Spaces, and so-on, we are investing heavily in building very rich, interactive experiences. With these investments, we are learning a great deal on the right and wrong ways to engineer rich, interactive web-sites.
 
Underneath all our Windows Live properties, we share a common framework for how we engineer our client experiences. The framework is very client-centric where we composite most of the page client-side. For example, if you were to view Live.com’s HTML, you will notice that it serves a web-page “shell” and meta-data that describes the content. This meta-data is interpreted by the Live.com application and then rendered. This approach is extraordinarily flexible as we can quickly enhance and extend the application without any heavy server lifting. However, as we have learned and is
I am presenting at the WebGuild user group next weekJuly 27 2007
If you are in the valley, feel free to join me Wednesday, January 25th, at the WebGuild user group (http://www.webguild.org).  I am giving a talk on Building Rich Interactive Web Aapplications using Ajax.  I will share design and engineering challenges that should be considered when building AJAX-like sites.