Microsoft’s Invasion of the Robots contest came to a close on the 15th of September, and this week the winners were announced on the MSDN Forums.
Out of 53 submissions, the grand prize went to LiveBot by Juzzi, who originally posted about the competition on the forums back in May, and he was also the winner of the World Best App competition. That’s dedication!
First prize went to Mother Nature, a bot which lets you “find and research national parks closest to you for a day outside in the fressh air and wilderness”. It seems to be having problems at the moment, and messages aren’t getting through to it.
Old favourite Spleak came in as one of the second place winners.
Take a look at Todd Biggs’ post with a full list of the winners, and what they won.
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!
ProgrammableWeb reports on Yahoo! Messenger’s new plug-in API:
Yahoo! this week introduced a new Plug-in SDK for Yahoo! Messenger. It is a JavaScript and C++ API for building features to run inside their IM client. Some initial plug-ins are over in the Yahoo! Gallery.
There is a new Messenger API entry on the ProgrammableWeb site.
Windows Live Dev is your one-stop shop for the Windows Live Platform, including information on getting started with Windows Live services, latest documentation and APIs, samples, access to community areas and relevant blogs, and announcements of future releases and innovations.
Windows Live Dev is a new site and will be growing over time, adding more content and features.
The website includes SDK’s for:
- Custom Domains
- Expo
- Gadgets
- Messener
- Search
- Spaces
- Virtual Earth
- Windows Live ID
Also included are some forums to discuss ideas and get some help and give suggestions! It’s nice to see the developers are being supported a lot more by Microsoft, I hope this trend continues.