Live Services Jumpstart – Day 1 Morning Session

As mentioned previously I am over at the Live Services Jumpstart Training in Sydney this week along with a few other kiwis.

Day 0 for me was a chance to do a photo walk in Sydney.

It has been a while since I’ve been in Sydney and it was great to get reacquainted with an old friend.

 Day 1 has kicked off with Dr Neil doing an all up technical overview of existing Live Services.

This is a bit of a refresher for me as I’m quite familiar with what services are available at https://dev.live.com but it is interesting to see these existing services beginning to migrate to the Azure Services Platform.

Tomorrow is all about the Live Framework (Mesh Services) and how we bring all these services together through a common SDK (the left box of the second tier of the picture below).

After Dr Neil’s session the morning was a dive into identity delivered by James McCutcheon my summary is below:

• • Identity - “LiveID is the submit button”
    • Web developers - Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK 1.2 describes a platform-independent interface for implementing Windows Live ID sign-in on Web sites of all kinds. This release includes a sample application for each of seven different programming languages: ASP.NET (C# and VB), Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby.
    • Client application developers can use Windows Live ID for authentication as well - Windows Live ID Client 1.0 SDK
    • Visual Studio ASP.NET developers - Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio November 2008 CTP
    • Delivering Data Portability – Delegated Authentication SDK v1.0

Important if you are trying this stuff you need to get your Application ID and secret for Web Authentication. Without it you will get an “Windows Live ApplicationID and Secret not provided” error.

During the setup here I chose “mydemo.com” for the domain and the return URL. Problem with this is that I don’t own this domain so I updated the mapping in my host file to get this to work. You may need to think about this when you are setting up your project.

Your application ID and secret should now be saved. To confirm that they are saved, open the web.config file and find the configuration section near the top of the file. This should contain an appSettings section. This section should look something like the following…

• • <appSettings>
       <add key="wll_appid" value="APPLICATION_ID"/>
       <add key="wll_secret" value="SECRET"/>
    </appSettings>
    

  • • There is also a community preview of using LiveID as an OpenID provider.
    • Microsoft Federation Gateway Service as a single sign-on provider for LiveID – check out the Identity: Live Identity Services Drilldown session from PDC.