Unifying service interfaces

As David Treadwell announced yesterday, we are starting to align the Windows Live services interfaces to use the AtomPub protocol, and to have a uniform set of conventions that are shared across internet services and the Project Astoria bits.

What does that mean? It means that starting now (and more in the future) you can interact with many consumer and infrastructure services in the same way. It also means that those Microsoft services out there and your own services -online or on-premises- created with the ADO.NET Data Services Framework look and behave in highly compatible ways.

You won't need to learn yet another API every time a new service comes out. Furthermore, we (or you, or services providers out there) won't need to create new APIs for every service. Highly uniform interfaces bring the opportunity for extensive client library and tools re-use across services of broad nature.

We've been talking about this for a while...and it's exiting to see the first pieces start to come in place.

If you want to know more, see live demos of services and tools working together, and chat about the details, we'll be going through all of this at Mix 2008. There is a talk specifically about this called "Accessing Windows Live Services using AtomPub" where I'll be telling the whole story and showing the thing working live.

More details about our Mix sessions here.

-pablo