Katie

W3bbo wrote:

At around 16:40 when they talk about Indigo someone plays the  (rediculous "Laugh" Flash wink), perhaps they realise how annoying their product really is

Jaz wrote:

Watching/Listening to it now.

Whats intresting so far is the amount of women on the team.  Are women more intrested in a "social networking" type program compared to "enterprise" type apps.

if you're watching this thread and if you'd like to answer, and you're a woman, what made you want to goto the MSN Live Messenger Team compared to the WinFS team.

For myself, I joined the messenger team about 10 mths ago, and before that I was working on the ".Net Compact Framework"...doing mostly low level work with the JIT and Com Interop.  I really enjoyed the technical aspect of my work there, but I was itching to work on more of an end-user application.  I'd see the applications our customers wrote (using our building blocks) and I'd get excited about the scenarios or the UI and really wanted to be closer to that action.  I participated in an MS offsite event and realized that there's this social computing space where there's still tons of work to do, and the other thing I was interested in is games.  The things that were attractive to me about Messenger were the scale and potential impact, the culture of the team, and the fact that I personally use the product.

And yes, I definitely noticed that there were somehow a ton of women over here, including female devs and a female dev lead.  During my first 3 years at MS, I can't recall a time where I even interacted with another female dev .  I think I pretty much got used to the gender disparities back in college tho.

Shark_M - the MSDN docs need to be corrected...we ended up not being able to ship the VS template, but you can get started pretty easily using my blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/katieblanch/

And you can use add-ins to implement your suggestions (update display name or picture on a timer).

Dannyres - Can you tell us more about the scenarios you'd like to implement?  That really helps us with figuring out the priority of APIs we should add. 

Also, there already is a OnStatusChanged and a OnMessageRecieved, etc.  To set things, you just do m_client.AddInProperties.UserTile = new Bitmap(); or m_client.AddInProperties.PersonalStatusMessage = "whatever"; 

I think your main complaint is that you don't like the model of these properties being applied to the add-in, rather then the local user directly.  The main thinking around this is that we want to expose add-ins in multiple ways.  Right now, you can have these applied to the local user by setting up the add-in as your agent.  In the future, I'd like to see add-ins exposed as fake buddies in your buddy list as well, kind of acting like a local bot, but a bit more powerful then a server side bot because each user can configure the add-in to behave how they'd like.  Also, keep in mind...that add-ins are meant to be rather integrated into messenger so it's a different model then our other COM APIs that can be used to set/get these properties

Anyway, we've still got a lot to figure out around add-ins...I'd really appreciate it if you send me some email about your scenarios and we can work that into our planning.

-Katie