Introducing cross-page support

The latest release of the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit not only makes it easier than ever to add great social capabilities to any web site, it also introduces few capabilities that make the Windows Live Messenger Library more powerful and extends it to more web scenarios.  

One of these features is cross-page support. With cross-page support the web user can remain signed-in as the user navigates or when the user submits a page. The Messenger Library will use the browser’s local storage capabilities to persist the user’s state as navigation occurs. The user will be able to resume ongoing conversations while navigating in the web site.

If you are a web application developer who has already integrated with Windows Live Messenger Library, the good news is that is no code change is required in order to ‘turn-on’ cross-page support. Applications that directly use the Messenger JavaScript Library should simply continue to create a user object and sign-in the user in each page. The Library will automatically use locally stored information to resume the user session as the page loads. Application developers that prefer the ease and flexibility of the UI Controls or the Bar will also benefit from cross-page without any special coding required.

To implement client-side persistence, the Web Toolkit uses the latest HTML 5 DOM-Storage standards which have proven to be fast and secure. If the user happens to be using a non-HTML 5 browser like Chrome 1, Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7 or FireFox 1.5, The Library will choose the best local storage technology available for that browser.

In an advanced scenario, an application may be interested in differentiating messages and conversation that were created on the current page versus ones that are carried over from previous pages that the user has visited in this session. For that use-case, the Reloaded Property was added to the Conversation class and to the Message class. For example, the Web Bar uses these properties to make sure that ongoing conversations do not blink when the page is loaded.

The locally stored cross-page information will expire as soon as the user is signed-out. The information is also domain-isolated – The user will need to sign back-in when navigating between two web sites that use the Web Toolkit, if those sites are on different domains.

As always, we welcome any feedback you may have about the Messenger Web Toolkit.

Offir Bakshitz
Software Design Engineer, Messenger Platform Team