Ian Blackburn

Windows Live

The Amazing Album Cover Atlas

http://theamazingalbumcoveratlas.org/ The excellent Word Magazine recently created an album cover atlas which shows locations of famous album covers.  Cool idea, but I didn't like the basic google maps interface.  So as an exercise and to also help spike out some work we are doing on www.lovecleanstreets.org I created a quick Virtual Earth and Silverlight version that make use of the VIEWS VE managed wrapper for Silverlight. Luckily the original developer, Ian Reeves used a REST service to get the data, so I was able to work with the same live data for my project.  There was no...

Windows Live IM Control - easy "Live Chat" on your web site

The Windows Live IM control is a very easy way to add a "live chat" feature to your web site. You can either use the server control that is in the Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio, or you can host the control with some html you can generate automatically Whichever way you create the control, you "hardwire" it to a particular Live ID who then receives the incoming messages (via Live Messenger) - this user also needs to accept that their current status will be shown on the web site. While testing make sure you don't login to the full IM and...

Learning Linq with LINQPad

If you are getting into LINQ - then this free, copy and run app, is a great way to play with it. It's a companion to C# 3.0 in a Nutshell but it is valuable without the book, and comes with 200 samples! Recommended!   Cheers   Ian Technorati Tags: Linq,LinqPad,C#,Nutshell

Multiple Administrators for Windows Live Domains

Windows Live Domains is an easy way for you to get free "Hotmail" type accounts for a domain you own.  You simply visit domains.live.com and follow the instructions.  This will eventually open up an Admin Centre that you can use to manage accounts, set-up co-branding, and generate a sign-up module.  You authenticate as an administrator for the domain via an existing live id account, and by making a change to DNS for the domain you want to manage (thereby proving you own or manage it) Since this authentication is tied to an existing live id, this seemed to imply that only...