What, How, Why: An interview with the Messenger team

The latest Channel 9 video focusing on Windows Live Messenger has arrived and this time it goes deep:

Ever wonder how the Live Messenger system works and why Live Messenger does what it does (and doesn’t)? Meet some of the developers and visionaries behind Windows Live Messenger and find out. We go pretty deep here, so fasten your seatbelts. This ain’t no marketing video… By the way, some of the Niners’ questions get answered towards the end of the interview. Enjoy!!

At 56 minutes in length (and 200MB+ in size!), there is lots of technical information to take in. Leah says you get to hear:

• The fundamentals of Instant Messaging
• Details on how Sharing Folders were built
• An explanation of add-ins
• The technical side of Yahoo! + WLM interoperability

According to one of the comments, Sharing Folders information is encrypted. Why not passwords?

If you’re a hardcore Fanatic, this is definitely one to see. Going by the still image, they appear to be talking about CS servers (eg. baymb-cs3.msgr.hotmail.com), so this is probably the most in-depth look provided by the team we’ve seen to date.