MessageCast, Inc. announced that its LiveMessage technology was deployed on MSN Video to give viewers real-time news, sports, and entertainment alerts whenever new items are posted on the web site.
LiveMessage is a broadcast application that can find people on popular real-time networks and deliver requested information via desktop alert, SMS, or email. The product is RSS compatible.
“It was painless to implement,” said Reed Price of MSN Video, “and we think that it will help drive return visits to MSN Video.” You can sign up for MSN Video Alerts at alerts.msn.com.
This small example searches the Internet Explorer cache directory for display pictures and custom emoticons from your contacts, where they are stored as BIN files in PNG format.
I don’t think I could get the Dir$() function to search IE cache so I used the find files API. Not sure if it works on 9x. It uses GDI+ to display the images.
Download prjFinder.zip
Also posted on the forum.
Microsoft announced its entry into the red-hot VoIP market Tuesday with the beta release of a new communications client capable of powering instant messaging, telephony integration and PC-based voice and video.
The software giant used the Fall 2004 VON Conference & Expo stage in Boston to introduce the client, code-named Istanbul, as a “client of choice” replacement for Windows Messenger in a new version of the Office Live Communications Server (LCS).
The existing LCS 2003 uses Windows Messenger as the embedded IM client, but when Istanbul ships, enterprise customers can expect to see the new communications client handling all aspects of text, presence, voice and video.
Anoop Gupta, vice president of the Real-Time Collaboration Business Group at Microsoft, said Istanbul represented a key milestone by integrating various modes of communication in one unified desktop experience.
The MSN promotional site imagine-msn.com has a new page promoting the release of the public beta of MSN Messenger 7, it offers you to sign up for a .NET alert with LiveMessage which you will receieve when it is released.
For the past three days .NET Messenger Service has been having plenty of problems, it all seemed to start after a period of maintenance on Friday. When the service was back up and running strange things started happening, most notably it was being very slow, it could take numerous tries to sign in, then trying to talk to someone would only periodically work, the server wasn't responding to CAL commands and the connection would just drop.
At the same time it started blocking certain words in display names again, trying to set your name as “.NET Messenger Service” (with exact case!) would result in error 209. america_online and anus_lick were reportedly also blocked; someone at Microsoft must have been very bored.
The status page also came down a few times while Messenger was out, error messages include ASP runtime errors, “Server too busy” and “Service unavailable” in big heading format. Everything seems to be working as “normal” now; even the word filter is gone again. phpMsgrStats logged a lot of abnormal status messages over the weekend.