The past week was synonymous with the advent of the first items from the Windows Live Wave 3 suite of services and applications. Among the Wave 3 clients served to end users was Windows Live Messenger 9.0 (2009) Beta Build 14.0.5027.908, designed as the successor of version 8.5. On September 25, Microsoft revealed that in the coming days, users of earlier Beta versions of Windows Live Messenger 9.0 (2009) would receive upgrade notifications related to the latest release of the instant messaging client.

“In the next few days, if you are still using a previous beta build of Windows Live Messenger that came out earlier this year, you will receive a prompt/message to upgrade to the latest beta version. We strongly encourage you to accept the upgrade and give us any feedback on the upgrade experience. Yes, we care and just thought we’d give you a heads up! All of you that have downloaded the latest beta version over the past week, won't see the prompt and can ignore this friendly notice,” explained a member of the Windows Live Messenger team.

At the same time, Build 14.0.5027.908 of the IM client, as a product in Beta stage, has brought inherent issues. The Redmond company indicated that it is harvesting user feedback and that it would take all the input into account softening the rough edges of the product before shipping the gold version. Microsoft is still receiving requests for new features or for the modification of existing features. However, the Redmond giant failed to disclose whether it would take any of the feature-related suggestions into account.

"All major issues have been logged and are being addressed. Here are a few that I wanted to quickly comment on, that were brought up by some of you. Custom emoticons don't display properly to the user. (We're working on fixing this... Fyi, they do show up to the person you are sending them to). Changing your status using the drop down menu can cause errors with the layout. This is a known issue around High Dpi. The work around (for now) is to your the File menu to change status. Ad content. I've brought up some of the concerns raised about the contents of a few ads with the advertising team and they are looking into this further,” the Windows Live Messenger team representative added.

Windows Live Messenger 9.0 (2009) Beta Build 14.0.5027.908 is available for download via the installer for Windows Live Wave 3 Beta via this link.