According to Brandon over at the Windows Experience blog  the app provides full integration with Windows Live Messenger, including shared photos from Flickr, Facebook and MySpace as well as the usual instant messaging fun. The new app also supports Facebook Chat, so you have your choice of platforms depending where your friends hang out.

Bear in mind that Messenger for Zune HD can publish what your listening to, so be careful when you get all nostalgic for Ace of Base and drop a revival hour on the Zune. No-one will hear, but they’ll all know.

Whilst you’re at the Marketplace, also check out three new games for Zune HD which were released yesterday -  WordMonger, Castles and Cannons and Dr. Optics Light Lab.

Kirill Tatatinov kindly asked me to showcase the solution back in November.  I showed it off during his keynote session at Convergence EMEA in Copenhagen.  The solution can be deployed on-premises, hosted by a partner or, as in our case, hosted by Microsoft (i.e. Windows Azure).  Naturally, Dynamics CRM can also be hosted in any of those modes as well.  In North America you might use CRM Online.  In Copenhagen we opted to use the great service of AlfaPeople.  They provided us a rock solid Dynamics CRM hosted platform. 

I just got the video for that from MS Studios so have a look.  I’m using the Silverlight Streaming service so you should be able to view this full screen:

The solution really shows off the power that ISVs get when using Dynamics CRM as a line-of-business application platform.  Not only do you get the platform that’ll get your app to market faster, you get to use the same skills to enhance that application and differentiate from competitors.  That could mean building compelling user experiences with Silverlight or it could mean hosting on the Azure Services Platform.  In this case, ADXSTUDIO is taking full advantage of the platform.  Hosting the app in Windows Azure.  Storing the content in SQL Data Services.  Using Live ID for authentication.  Performance, scalability, security and privacy with no capital expenditures.  Scale up or down when you need to.  Nice!

Update:  Looks like the transcript for the entire keynote was posted here.

Update #2: Moving this video to Channel 9 as the Silverlight Streaming Service has been decommissioned.

Identity and authentication is hard.  Simple, scalable and secure login capabilities require a great deal of experience to build and a great deal of effort to maintain and keep running.  Windows Live ID provides you a proven solution for building identity-aware applications and is used today by over 460 million users.

In our case, since we’ve integrated Live ID into the system, we let Microsoft manage all the details related to identity and authentication.  Live ID assigns each of our users a token that is specific to our site.  That means Microsoft lets us know that the person coming to the site is the same person that registered.  That token is unique to our site so that from the perspective of the user their privacy is protected (e.g. they cannot be tracked across multiple web sites).  In fact, the token is the only thing the site will see.  So even though the user may use an email address and password to login to Live ID the site never sees that unless the user explicitly provides that information (as in our example by typing it into a profile page).

The simplicity of this is just amazing.  As a developer I just have to register my site with Windows Live ID and then redirect my users to the Live ID login page whenever I need them to be authenticated.  Live ID handles the authentication and then redirects back to a page that I’ve registered.  You can even brand the Windows Live ID login page that your users will see so that it will appear as if it is your own login page.  Nice!

While Windows Live ID does a great job of helping me as a conference organizer to identify and authenticate my conference attendees, we also need to authenticate the Windows Azure site to the Dynamics CRM site so that they can exchange information.  We’re obviously not going to have CRM licenses for all our self-service users (the thousands of conference attendees in this case) so we use a certificate on the Windows Azure site to ensure that only that site has access to the CRM data.  Once the certificate is on my Azure site, we use a Live ID service account to handle the authentication between the two servers.

This episode is part of a 5-part series. In this series we’ve tried to explain how you can combine the Microsoft Web Platform with Dynamics CRM to quickly build and deploy self-service solutions. The full set of videos include:

1. Dynamics Duo Rides Again
2. Dynamics Duo: Everybody needs an Identity (this video)
3. Dynamics Duo: Wide World Importers Code
4. Dynamics Duo: Composition with Third-Party Web Services
5. Dynamics Duo: Silverlight and Jazz Hands 

Both Girish and I enjoyed recording this series. We hope you enjoyed them as well. If you have comments or suggestions for other topics, feel free to add comments below or email Girish or me (Ben) directly.

To get an OpenID, there are already a ton of mainstream channels you can use. For example, if you have an account at one of the following services, you already have an OpenID:

A while back, Catherine sat down with Lynn Ayres to discuss Windows Live ID developer offerings. The conversation starts out with Lynn describing how she got into software (turns out Lynn is an avid online gamer J), and then transitions to Windows Live ID around 00:03:17 and how it relates to Passport (00:04:19). Windows Live ID scenarios are discussed around 00:07:00.

Demos start at 00:08:32, and include other Windows Live developer offerings – like the Windows Live Contacts control and the Windows Live Spaces Photo control; the specific code that uses the new Web Authentication (an HTML iframe element) can be seen around 00:13:24; the Windows Live ID Client SDK is demonstrated around 00:16:05.

A few notes regarding changes that have occurred since this video was recorded:

·         Windows Live ID Web Authentication has been released, and the documentation can be found here.

·         The Windows Live ID Client SDK is still in alpha (you can learn more about the alpha refresh here) and will be released later this summer.

·         In the Web Authentication demo (around 00:13:37), Lynn was accessing our integration/test environment (http://login.live-int.com). This functionality is now available in the production service and the URL should be modified accordingly (remove “-int” from the domain name: http://login.live.com)

·         You can get an application ID for Web Authentication here. The connect.microsoft.com site Lynn referred to (around 00:14:13) was for the beta.

Lynn Ayres is a Program Manager on the Windows Live ID team.

The interview was conducted by Catherine Heller, Windows Live Technical Evangelist.

And remember, http://dev.live.com is the source for all things developer-related around Windows Live!