14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft announced that it was cooking a set of Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio 2008 for some time and on November 8, the first Community Technology Preview of the product has become available for download. The toolkit is designed to integrate seamlessly into Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista and has as prerequisites the following development tools: Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Beta 2 Express Edition, along with ASP.NET Ajax 1.0 and ASP.NET Futures (July 2007). In Vista users will have to run the toolkit with elevated privileges.
"Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio are a set of control add-ins to make incorporating Windows Live services into your Web application easier with Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008," explained Angus Logan, a Senior Technical Product Manager with Microsoft, adding that "the four controls included in this CTP release are: Contacts Control, IDLogin Control, IDLoginView, Control and SilverlightStreamingMedia Control."
Essentially Windows Live Tools will enable developers to leverage the basic functionality delivered by Windows Live Contacts, Windows Live ID authentication, LoginView and Silverlight streaming when creating a website. And on top of the controls enumerated by Logan, the toolkit also brings to the table a Visual Studio Project Template - ASP.NET Windows Live Web Site, a resource designed to enable the building of a Windows Live website.
Developers will be able to add Windows Live ID authentication support via the IDLoginView extension. In this manner the functionality associated with the ASP.NET LoginView control will be expanded, bundling together a Windows Live ID with an ASP.NET membership profile. IDLogin can be set in place in order to tie an application with the Windows Live ID authentication mechanism.
"Contacts: The Contacts control allows developers to include Windows Live Contacts into their web pages. The control provides the ability to raise client and server events for sign-in/sign-out and data transfer activities. It also allows the developer's webpage to get word of mouth through viral traffic. SilverlightStreamingMedia: The SilverlightStreamingMedia control extends the ASP.NET Futures Media control by allowing you to play videos from your Silverlight Streaming account," Microsoft revealed.