support for Portable Contacts schema in MSFT's LiveFX preview

[Joseph Smarr]

Not sure how I missed this, but last week at Le Web, Jeff Hansen from MSFT mentioned that their new "Live Framework (LiveFX) Technology Preview" is "doing some things with Portable Contacts" and encouraged people to check it out (see http://www.thesocialweb.tv/blog/2008/12/test.html starting at ~19:30). I did some looking around, and found Dare Obasanjo's post from 11/16 (http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/11/17/LiveFrameworkLiveFXIsItMicrosoftsGDataOrSomethingMore.aspx) where he mentions the following way in which LiveFX's REST apis go beyond " a vanilla implementation" of AtomPub:

Support for Portable Contacts: By specifying the parameter $type=portable when requesting contact data, the results will be returned in the Portable Contacts schema format as either JSON or Plain Old XML. 

This is super cool, and congrats to MS for finding ways to support Portable Contacts sooner rather than later! While this isn't full support for Portable Contacts (e.g. because it doesn't use OAuth, which I believe MS is looking at, but they still have some concerns since their version Windows LiveID DelAuth has some extra bells and whistles that they're concerned with giving up), it demonstrates great support for working with open standards where possible, and it is already useful for developers, since at least they can get the data in a familiar format and reuse code there. Awesome!

 

Can anyone from MS provide additional color on what specifically is supported here, how/why support was added for Portable Contacts here, and where this might be headed?

 

Thanks! js

[Angus Logan]

Hey – I’m running around doing a few things before I disappear on vacation (hopefully I’ll get something to you tomorrow) – sorry forgive my brevity.

 

In the Live Framework we have the ability to represent our Infoset in many different formats fairly easily and PoCo seems to be gaining traction with the address book data type so we decided to implement it as a preview.

 

In terms of what we do/don’t have in place :: Nishant/Inder can correct me but what we have implemented is the wire format (not sure about the filtering/paging) and we are not compliant WRT to OAuth as we are dependent on Live ID DelAuth – though we are watching OAuth closely.

 

When will this hit the street? Not certain yet – it is a preview and therefore it could be removed before we ship (unsure when we’ll ship) but for now it’s in.

 

Lets chat more in the new year.

[Nishant Gupta]

Sorry for jumping in late but I am still on vacation.

 

Yes, the support for now is limited to wire format. We do not support the paging and filtering constructs as of now. Try it and let us know if you find any issues with at least the wire format.

 

 

From: Joseph Smarr [mailto:jsm...@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2008 7:18 AM
To: Angus Logan
Cc: Nishant Gupta; Inder Sethi
Subject: Re: support for Portable Contacts schema in MSFT's LiveFX preview

 

Thanks for the update, Angus, and let's definitely all catch up after the holidays! js