Published on
4 years, 4 months ago in
MSNP.
A lot of people using or developing third-party clients connecting to the .NET Messenger Service have started getting error 401 Unauthorized during the Passport authentication process. It appears that from April 1st 2006, Passport 3 has started replacing Passport 2.
There is a pretty simple fix to this, you just need to change the way your code authenticates, the new Passport 3 methods involves a simple SOAP request, some nice folks quickly documented it at MSNPiki. There are also some implementations at the bottom for C#, Java, Perl and PHP.
Michael Sun posted some new screenshots of a new look Windows Live Messenger, labeled Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0683.00_Branches, a few sites are reporting this as an April refresh so hopefully we’ll see it very soon.
The post is mostly in Chinese, but the screen shots speak for themselves. Mess with MSN Messenger has summarized some of the changes that can be seen:
Visual innovation:
- New desktop/program icon
- New Sharing Folders icon
- New Video Conversation and Call a contact icons (also in main window)
New features:
- Rhapsody Music Service (”Discover, play and share from Rhapsody’s extensive catalog”)
- Windows Live Call Beta, PC-to-telephone calling provided by MCI Web Call
- Windows Live Sign-in Assistant (”See all your Windows Live ID accounts at sign-in with Internet Explorer”)
- “In a Call” status (automatically enabled with Windows Live Call)
- Option to remove “[contact's name] says:” preceding IMs in conversations
- Windows Live Messenger events (sounds) integrated in Alerts and Sounds options tab
- The return of the (removable) MSN Today popup
- Calendar icon in main window
- “Show shadows and animation” and change Window color options in the General options tab
Another follow up today, this time on the Hack Day as reported on Tuesday. Daniel from the Windows Live Messenger blog has posted about it:
This was my first Hack Day event. I didn’t hack Messenger – it would have been unfair for the rest of the hackers 
. First I worked with two other Messenger devs (Justin and Ravi) on a search macro to search the top Messenger forums. Next I moved on to hack the new Expo API which was totally new to me. I enjoyed eating a lot of pizza, setting up the environment, reading and trying samples, but I didn’t come up with anything worth to present. Maybe next time 
At the end of the event, judges picked the best hacks and awarded prizes, the best of which was an XBox 360 premium with accessories. To my surprise our Messenger Forums Search Macro won second place and a remote controlled truck.
I just put up an OPML service for the Blogroll category here, which is second from the top on the right menu bar.
Most RSS readers will allow you to import all the feeds by just providing the URL to it, or uploading it.
Each link in the Blogroll category has a RSS feed associated with it and is the only category which does so. Recommended Links and Blogroll display ten random links for each page load and the Affiliates category displays five random link images. To have a look at all the links in each category, just go to the Web Links page.
Check out this post from a “Product Planner” called Ken in Windows Live. It shows you to an article posted at the Windows Live Developer Center re business opportunities with Windows Live Messenger (it just says MSN Messenger at moment). Not a lot new there except for some stuff about the Kanoodle tie in, but the main reason I am submitting this what Ken says at the end:
There are some cool new extensibility features coming in the next update of Windows Live Messenger beta for .NET developers, details to be posted when the next beta build is released online. There will be much more online about all these topics by mid June (Tech-Ed 2006).
So it sounds like some good news and they are starting to take developers more seriously for MSN Messenger/Windows Live Messenger.!