Last week when Windows Live Messenger 8 was released, Katie Blanch mentioned a few bug fixes to the add-ins feature:
- A possible crash when an add-in throws an unhandled managed exception.
- Encoding/Decoding issues for action messages that would cause unicode characters to not display properly.
- Issues sending messages if you specify a large name for your add-in.
You can find out more about the Window Live Messenger add-ins functionality at it’s documentation at MSDN and the Messenger section at Windows Live Dev.
There was a post just made at the Mess with MSN Messenger forums where Strandberg from the MSDN forums has discovered how to remove the Web limitations from the Windows Live Messenger add-in SDK.
According to the thread:
The messenger plug-in SDK is a tad useless because it doesn’t allows you to read/write to files, make web calls, create proper forms, or actually do anything but sending pre-made messages. This is caused by the fact that its running with the web limitation by default.
View the thread for instructions on the workaround. Now thanks to Strandberg’s discovery, we can now use everything that our development language has to offer!
Previously we have only heard about the new Windows Live Messenger add-in feature through unofficial sources. Today, Ken Levy, product planner for Windows Live, has blogged promoting it to developers and to get some feedback:
In our continued effort to empower developers interested creating components for customizing Windows Live Messenger 8.0 via the extensibility model, we have set up functionality in Windows Live Messenger try out and test the new Add-ins feature. Add-ins are API hooks to customize, extend, and build upon the Windows Live Messenger client application. We plan to release this Add-in SDK as a download for msdn.com in early June, so beta feedback on the Add-ins SDK need to be sent to us by the end of May.
The add-in feature is not active by default and the add-in section in the Options dialog is hidden. To enable the add-ins section in the Options dialog, create a .reg file containing the following text, and then import the file to the registry. Alternately, download the reg file and run it.
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger]
"AddInFeatureEnabled"=dword:00000001