A couple of days ago I was a partner event in Manchester and I was asked a BPOS question that totally stumped me at the time.

“Will signatures that I set on OWA (Outlook Web Access) or in Outlook synchronise across all the computers I use, and OWA?”

The simple answer is no.  But having done lots of digging around there aren’t many email solutions that do offer this kind of functionality.  The way I get around this is I use Windows Live Sync (soon to be Windows Live Mesh) part of the Windows Live Essentials Beta.  This keeps all my signatures in sync across the different machines I use.  For OWA I set my signature manually.

If anyone has any better ideas for this, please let me know.  And a thank you goes out to those who helped me to the answer.

We already showed you how Messenger is a great social media aggregator so you know it brings everything together for you to make life easier.  What if you don’t have lots of people to talk to on messenger wouldn’t it be great to be able to save time and connect with your Facebook friends in a handy single chat window.  Well now you can.

Facebook chat is now integrated with Messenger and it’s done in slick and trustworthy way.

The first thing you see if you already have it installed and the links setup is this following box appear at the top of the social stream.  There’s no automatic assumption made that you want to chat with your Facebook friends, some apps might do that but Messenger is built to keep your trust.  If you don’t already have FB integrated you can do the same thing through Tools > Settings… hit Alt first.

The next thing you get is choice over what you want to share with Facebook, one obviously being chat.

Hit Connect with Facebook provide your logon deets and your golden!  Now in your Messenger window you’ll start to see the online status of your Friends when they’re on Facebook or using any other application that enables Facebook chat.

I’m finding I’m actually using Facebook chat where I didn’t use it before and there are always more people online for me to talk to, oh yeah and I get alerted when new people are online through a little slice of toast popping up in the bottom right of my screen that tells me the difference between my messenger and my Facebook friends…some are both obviously and if they’re connected to both at the same time Messenger takes the load because it’s a richer experience.

You can get the loveable refreshed beta here.

This was originally posted to Underbelly where we talk about cool webby stuff and things like that.

Every week I write a simple wrap up of all the things I’ve posted during the week you can subscribe to them here.  Creating it can be slow going if I’ve posted tons of stuff and copy and pasting all the links creating some spiffy text to flow around it and that sort of thing can be a pain.  So I decided to automate it.

I wanted to be able to use Windows Live Writer to create the post so that I had maximum flexibility and a really great editor to be able tweak the post in.  I’m currently using the Windows Live Writer Beta from the Live Essentials Beta, which really is the best blogging tool available and it has super cool plug-in framework.  I went looking for a way of getting those posts and producing the wrap-up post but there weren’t any plug-ins out there.

So it was time to do some digging into what resources are available for creating plug-ins.  The Windows Live Writer SDK came up containing a bunch of useful APIs, there are three really: Application (for manipulating the Application), Content Source Plugin (which really is used to do stuff inside a post) and the Provider Customization API (used to customise how WLW works with different blog engines).

I went directly for the Application API.  Also just so you know, I’m not a very good coder.

The Application API is what’s used to poke stuff into WLW, essentially it’s how the Blog This stuff in IE works.  I have an idea, an API, now what…err…..I grabbed Visual C# Express 2010, a free download and tried to remember how C# works (I’m a VB guy and any chance I get now I move my botched programs skills to C#).  Express is great for having your first play with code.  The next thing I did was to work out how the UI was going to work, I wanted it to be really obvious how to use this thing.  I thought about 2 calendars and some text boxes and a REALLY big button.

I created a WPF form and found the calendar control.  Then I started to read up on it and found out that it’s possible to use it to select a date range…brilliant, I only need one calendar control which is far less clutter.  A couple of text boxes and a button and we’re done.

I’m not going to go through all the code but Windows Live Writer MVP Scott’s Live Spaces page guided me through what I needed to do.

Essentially the core of the code is this:

wlwapp = new WindowsLiveWriterApplication();
((IWindowsLiveWriterApplication2)this.wlwapp).BlogThisHtml(textBox2.Text, BuildHTML);

All I’m doing is creating a new instance of the wlwapp and passing it a prepopulated string of HTML called BuildHTML.  That kind of begs the question, where does BuildHTML come from?  The answer is that I use SyndicationFeed (part of .net 4) to read my blogs RSS feed and poke it into Build HTML.  It’s very simple stuff as you can see… I’ve also been very lazy and not renamed my TextBoxes or any other controls oops…

XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(textBox1.Text);
                    SyndicationFeed feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(reader);

                    ///parse the feed items
                    foreach (var item in feed.Items)
                    {

                        ///check that the item is within the range we want
                        if (calendar1.SelectedDates.Contains(item.PublishDate.Date))
                        {
                            BuildHTML = BuildHTML + "<li><a href="";
                            //within each item we look for the link
                            foreach (var link in item.Links)
                            {
                                BuildHTML = BuildHTML + link.Uri.ToString() + "'>";
                            }
                            BuildHTML = BuildHTML + item.Title.Text +
                                "</a></li> ";
                        }
                    }
                    reader.Close();

There’s not much more to this application really other than the fact that I’ve published it (Project > Publish xxx in Visual C# Express 2010) to the internet and that built me an install on my server to publish and maintain the application.  This simple tool will save me 1 hour a week from here to eternity.  If you do it once, great, if you do it twice, automate.

Check out my tool at its application page.

A whole raft of updates to Windows Live have started to roll out and that includes the Office Live Web Apps – online versions of Microsoft’s Office applications.  They’re available through SkyDrive and any documents that you have on your SkyDrive are available for editing and viewing.  If you don’t have a SkyDrive account then you should, it’s 25GB of free online storage and it’s going to become a cornerstone to the Live experience.  I use mine for document and photo sharing and it’s simply superb.

One feature that I love, in these days of privacy worries, is how simple to manage sharing is.  A slider from lots of sharing to none.  Simple.  Yet I can also share with individuals, perfect for sharing that killer presentation (or that photo of the BBQ in the comedy apron that you only want attendees to have).

TIP: Just noticed something else neat.  When a folder or file is shared with individuals by email it gets a different icon…this is private, everyone and specific people respectively.

One of the gems of Windows Live Essentials (which are explored quite thoroughly in my book) is Movie Maker which provides dead simple movie editing.  The best analogy is one I heard today “Movie Maker is the notepad of video editing tools” (not sure where I heard that though).  It’s true enough too, they are about as feature rich as each other, stripped down, bare bones (OK notepad is the most useful tool in Windows).  Move Maker’s just received an update and lost it’s “Beta” moniker.

Brilliant 1080p (full HD) output quality, live previews of effects and Windows 7 jump lists are some of the new features since it’s exited Beta.

This has been everywhere today but Redmond Pie has a great roundup.  Get the software here and some videos to play with if you don’t have any of your own.

[via the inimitable Steve Clayton]

I’ve just been reading on Techcrunch and eWeek about the cool new features that are about to come along in Live Wave 3.  Basically it’s the next step in the story of turning Microsofts Software plus Services web technology on.

What we get this time though is what promises to be some hefty integration.  Bringing not only all your Live services together (which till now have frankly been all over the place) but it also allows you to start aggregating your external content, ala Friend Feed.  Mike Arrington on Techcruch has published the reviewers guide with lots of delicious detail, but this is looking good.

Potentially it’s less Walled Garden than most of the other social network sites and it also integrates your email, calendar, well pretty much every darn thing you’ve got.  The interface is also getting a far more consistent make over which is never ever a bad thing.

Reports are it’s due to be turned on this evening.