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Release Notes: Windows Live Tools July 2008 CTP

Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio July 2008 CTP Release Notes

Welcome to the July 2008 Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio. This is an update to previous CTP Release (February 2008 CTP). In this CTP, we have provided you Map control and upgraded to Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 Tools.

Please give us your feedback! Let us know what you like and what you don't like. What are the things that are missing today that stop you from using Windows Live Tools? What are your "must have" features? Stop by and give us your feedback on the Windows Live Dev Connect site.

What's included in the July 2008 CTP

ASP.NET Server Controls

· Contacts

· IDLoginStatus

· IDLoginView

· Map

· MessengerChat

· SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer

Visual Studio Project Template

· ASP.NET Windows Live Web Site

Changes in July 2008 CTP

· New Map Control

· New property for IDLoginStatus for allowing transparent background color so that it can mesh with your web page color. To achieve this, just set the BackColor property to “transparent” and AllowTransparency property to true.

· SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer Control upgraded to Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 Tools.

· SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer Control supports “Manage Videos” feature of Silverlight Streaming.

· Contacts Control no longer adds privacypolicy.htm file to your solution. You will have to provide your own privacy policy statement web page.

Map: Map control enables web sites to provide their users in immersive experiences that show Microsoft Virtual Earth Maps, aerial imagery and bird’s eye view. A Web site can user this control and get the functionality of Microsoft Virtual Earth Maps, directions, finding and mapping local search results etc. This is an ASP.NET version of existing JavaScript control available at http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/sdk/.

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. This control is an ASP.NET version of the existing JavaScript control available at http://dev.live.com/contacts.

IDLoginStatus: The IDLoginStatus control quickly allows you to provision Windows Live ID authentication for your application. Now you drag and drop the control on your web page, provision your Application ID, and compile/run the project. This also provides for client/server side events for sign-in/sign-out user actions, a property to maintain your application context, and properties to specify background/foreground colors to mesh with your web page.

IDLoginView: IDLoginView extends the functionality of the ASP.NET LoginView control by adding support for Windows Live ID authentication. It allows you to associate a Windows Live ID with an ASP.NET membership profile to provide a single sign-on experience for your web site users. It adds new templates to provide richness in your web site based on the login state of your web site user.

MessengerChat Control: MessengerChat control enables web sites to show the presence status of Windows Live Messenger users, and let site visitors engage in instant massage conversations with the messenger users. A Web site can invite its users to share their Messenger presence and exchanges messages with visitors to the site. ASP.NET Server Control provides you to three views to choose from (Window, Button, and Icon) and set of themes to choose from or build your own custom theme to fit into needs of your web site.

SilverlightStreamingMedia: The SilverlightStreamingMedia control extends the Silverlight Media Player control by allowing you to play videos from your Silverlight Streaming account. Now at design time, you can specify your account credentials and choose the video you want to display on your web pages.

Details for Windows Live Tools are available at http://dev.live.com/tools.

Prerequisites for Windows Live Tools

This CTP release only targets English (United States).

Operating System

· Microsoft Windows XP SP 2

· Microsoft Windows Vista

Development Tools

· Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 RTM Release

· Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition

ASP.NET

· Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5 (already installed if you have Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or .NET 3.5 Framework installed)

Silverlight

· Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 Tools for Visual Studio 2008

Installing the July 2008 CTP

· Please ensure that you have all the prerequisites described above installed on your development workstation.

· Please ensure that you remove previous releases of Windows Live Tools from your development workstation.

· Download the July 2008 CTP Release from here and install on the development workstation.

Installation Issues – Windows Vista

Installation on Windows Vista requires elevated privileges:

If you are installing this CTP on Windows Vista, we recommend that you allow the Installer program to run under elevated privileges when prompted by the User Account Control settings.

Uninstalling the Windows Live Tools CTP

Microsoft Windows XP SP2

To uninstall this CTP release from Windows XP SP2:

1) Click Start

2) Click Control Panel

3) Open Add/Remove Programs

4) Select “Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio CTP” and Click Remove

Microsoft Windows Vista

To uninstall this CTP Release from Windows Vista:

1) Click Start

2) Click Control Panel

3) Click Programs and Features

4) Select “Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio CTP” and Click Uninstall

Uninstallation Issues – Windows Vista

Uninstallation on Windows Vista requires elevated privileges:

If you are uninstalling this CTP from Windows Vista, we recommend that you allow the Installer program to run under elevated privileges when prompted by the User Account Control settings.

Technical Support and Community

· You can participate in technical discussion with other developers in the Windows Live Controls Development Forum.

· You can provide your feedback and report bugs at the Windows Live Dev Connect site.

Known Issues

General

Drag & drop behavior in Markup View

When you drag and drop these controls on a web page from the toolbox in markup view, certain functionality of the controls is not invoked. For details about the functionality not invoked, please refer to the specific controls listed below. To fix this issue, switch to designer view or split view in your Visual Studio IDE and then drag and drop the controls.

Enabled property of controls

This release does not support the enabled property of the controls.

Contacts

CreateContacts, DeleteContacts, CommitContacts and AbortContacts are only available in List view mode

Since List view is the data sharing mode of the Contacts control, CreateContacts, DeleteContacts, CommitContacts and AbortContacts methods are only available in List view mode and are not available in Tile/TileList view mode.

Client side accessors for a set of properties don’t return values

If developer did not specify a set of properties or did not set these properties of Contacts control, accessing these properties through method calls get_<propertyname> will not return values. For example, if a script executes method call get_InnerBackgroundColor and developer did not set this property either at design time, this method call will return null value for the InnerBackgroundColor property. Similarly, if this method gets called in a script prior to set_<propertyname> method, get_<propertyname> will not return values. However, if either developer specifies these properties at design time or at run time prior to executing get_<propertyname> call, it would return the values correctly.

Usage of Contacts Control within UpdatePanel and synchronous postbacks

This control does not work within UpdatePanel and synchronous postbacks. If used with full page postbacks, control loses its state and this scenario is currently not supported. If a web page contains controls that generate synchronous postbacks, convert the web page/control functionality to generate partial page updates through asynchronous postbacks.

IDLoginStatus

Drag and drop behavior in Markup View

Dragging and dropping the IDLoginStatus control from the toolbox to a web page, in markup view, does not apply the required changes to web.config for your project. To fix this issue, switch to designer view or split view in your Visual Studio IDE and then drag and drop the control.

When multiple IDLoginStatus controls are used, client/server side events are raised only for the first time for web page.

If your web page has multiple instances of IDLoginStatus control and all have client/server event instances defined, events are raised only for the first time for the web page. You can have multiple IDLoginStatus controls on your web page however, once logged into Windows Live ID; you are shown logged into all the instances of the control.

IDLoginView

AssociatePromptTemplate is not shown if AutomaticallyAssociateTemplate is set to false and PromptOnAssociation is set to true

MessengerChat

During design time, Intellisense does not show ColorTheme as tag in partially trusted levels.

When setting ColorTheme property for MessengerChat Control, if your development environment is marked as medium trust, ColorTheme property show properly in Intellisense. This property, however, works correctly in runtime. In Design time, this property needs full trust level.

MessengerChat control’s minimum width and height for IM Windows is 300px x 300px.

Minimum width and height values for MessengerChat control are 300px by 300px.

SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer

SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer control only supports English video file names

This control only supports video files with English names. Unsafe characters and non-ANSI characters are unsupported for this release.

SilverlightStreamingMedia control only supports video files

This release only supports video files uploaded into Silverlight streaming account.

SilverlightStreamingMedia raises Jscript runtime error indicating silverlight.services.live.com could not be resolved

This is most likely to occur when your application resides on a corporate network which has a proxy server. Please add the following elements under the <configuration> element in your web.config.

<system.net>

</defaultProxy>

</system.net>

Map

Functionality related to ShapeLayers and TileLayers does not work when calling from <asp:Button> handlers in FireFox 2.

When using <asp:Button> handlers to call methods related to ShapeLayers/TileLayers with FireFox 2 as client, ShapeLayers/TileLayers functionality doesn’t seem to work. To workaround, set the ‘UseSubmitBehavior’ property for <asp:Button> control to false. Setting this property to false causes <asp:Button> use ASP.NET postback mechanism over browser’s submit behavior.

Control does not prompt for “Virtual Earth 3D Installation” when switched to 3D view of the control

Locale property throws an exception when set from an event handler

Locale property is not configurable at runtime. You can either set this property at design time (in markup view or in property grid) or only the Page_Load event handler.

CenterAndZoom extender when used in CenterAndZoom mode always centers at LatLong(0,0)

Copyright information

References

· Windows Live Contacts

· Windows Live ID authentication

· Windows Live Messenger IM Control

· Microsoft Virtual Earth

· Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax

· Microsoft Silverlight

· Silverlight Streaming