Some reactions -

http://twitter.com/Jasrags/statuses/1010378510

http://twitter.com/a/statuses/1010354680

http://twitter.com/dougal/statuses/1010394801

http://twitter.com/dougal/statuses/1010406262

http://twitter.com/dougal/statuses/1010409655

I was hoping to get more questions from the crowd in terms of how it compares to GData APIs, Google Gears, when can they use but I guess it was late in the day!

I am hoping that once we provision some (or maybe most) of these to play with our APIs, there will be more vaulable feedback. I will post anything that comes about due to this as and when it happens.

Here is the basic function in Python which returns the data in a dictionary given the URL -

import urllib2
import urllib
import json
def getData(uri):
   authStr = '<insert your auth token here>';
   # create the request
   req = urllib2.Request(uri)
   # add the headers
   req.add_header('Accept', 'application/json')
   req.add_header('Authorization', authStr)
   response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
   data = response.read()
   # convert the string to a dictionary and return it
   return json.JSONDecoder().decode(data);

If I save the above function in a file called livefx.py, then I can play with it as follows -

As you can see that we can get the service document by getting the data from the cloud endpoint in the form of a dictionary. Printing the dictionary gives us the following -

1. Base Uri – base URI for the cloud endpoint
2. Contacts Link – relative URI for navigating to user’s Windows Live Contacts
3. Profiles – relative URI for navigating to user’s Windows Live Profiles
4. Mesh – relative URI for navigating to user’s Mesh

Now, if I have to access user’s contacts, I can do that as follows -

Similarly, if I have to list all the user’s mesh objects, I can do the following -

I hope you would have gotten the idea by now on how to work with other resources. You might ask how to get hold of the auth token? Well, there are a more than a couple ways in which you can access it.

1. Access it via .NET SDK for Live Framework
2. Look at the request header in Livefx Resource Browser
3. Look at the request header when you are sending request to http://developer.mesh-ctp.com on Fiddler.

Ofcourse, when you are building a production web application, you will replace this header with that used for delegated authentication and use the delegated authentication token.

Here is the link to the talk – http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/bb51/

Comments welcome!

I am not an avid blogger and this is my first fourth attempt on it. I hope it sticks this time.

What is lifefx? Life framework. Which means? I am not really sure but it sounded cool and geeky so I decided to go with it given that I am currently working on something called livefx!!

For what its worth – framework means underlying set of ideas: a set of ideas, principles, agreements, or rules that provides the basis or outline for something intended to be more fully developed at a later stage (from here). You can now imagine things that I maybe discussing here.