Windows Live Calendar Beta will be upgraded September 18
The Windows Live Calendar Beta service will be upgraded on Thursday, Sept 18. The service is expected to be unavailable for a few hours starting around 3 PM Pacific time. Your data is safe and will be available to you after the upgrade.
We hope you’ll like the new features you’ll see in the Windows Live Calendar Beta. We’ll say more about new features after the upgrade is complete!
Source- Windows Live Mail Blog
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Microsoft Office Outlook Connector version 12.1 Beta 2 now available!
Microsoft has just released the Beta 2 version of the Outlook Connector – an add-in that puts your Windows Live Hotmail data in Outlook. While Beta 2 does not introduce new features, it provides several improvements aimed at making synchronization with e-mail, contacts, and the free Windows Live Calendar Beta service more robust. If you want to know more about the benefits of connecting to the Windows Live Calendar service, I recommend you read the original Outlook Connector Beta 1 blog post here.
Outlook Connector 12.1 Beta 2 is also available as part of the Windows Live Beta, a collection of free Windows Live services and applications, available here.
In light of some customer feedback we received since Beta 1 was released, it is worth noting that the Outlook Connector 12.0 and the Outlook Connector 12.1 synchronize calendar data against two separate calendaring services.
- Outlook Connector 12.0 synchronizes with the MSN Calendaring service (a MSN Premium service only).
- Outlook Connector 12.1 synchronizes with the free Windows Live Calendar service.
Source- MS Office Outlook Blog
Download Windows Live Wave 3 Beta
With the Windows Live Wave 3 beta due to start today. Here’s the download links for the new Wave 3 suite of applications, including Messenger v9, Windows Live Movie Maker, Mail with Calendar synchronisation, Writer, Photo Gallery, Family Safety and the Outlook Connector. For the paranoid amongst you, yes the files are hosted on download.microsoft.com.
http://g.live.com/1rebeta3/en/wlsetup-web.exe (only downloads the applications you select) 
Download Here (downloads all the applications, you can chose which ones to install) 
Thanx to Liveside
Windows Live Wave 3 Beta Testers selected
Just got a mail from the Windows Live Team that you have been selected for the upcoming Windows Live Beta Program.Here is what the mail reads-
You’ve been selected to participate in the upcoming Windows Live Beta Program. You’ll be helping us ensure that we deliver a great experience to all Windows Live users.
Please click on below link to activate your membership in this program.
Link Removed
(If this link does not work for you, copy the full link and paste it into the Web browser address bar.)
As a Windows Live beta tester you’ll have a unique opportunity to communicate with us, including the ability to file bugs and talk directly to the product teams in private newsgroups.
Our new beta release is right around the corner as we are putting some final touches on it. You’ll be notified when it becomes available, and the newsgroups will also open prior the release.
While you’re waiting, we appreciate you taking a few minutes to fill out this pre-program survey (https://connect.microsoft.com/Survey/Survey.aspx?SurveyID=6718&SiteID=658), it helps us to know a little more about you.
To report a problem or to ask a question, visit the Help page.
Thank you very much for your enthusiasm. We are very excited to have you in the program!
Windows Live Team
Microsoft
So,now you could expect greater coverage about Windows Live from Tech Today soon,anyone else who got the mail do reply.
Windows Live Agents SDK Feedback
We are starting to plan our 5.2 Windows Live Agents SDK release. Even though we have many ideas and directions that we can take the SDK, we would love to hear what kind of improvements and features you would like to see!
Please email your suggestions to wlasdkfeedback@live.com and we will do our best to make sure you see the improvements you have requested in our 5.2 release and beyond!
Source- MSDN Blog
Media Center Gadgets for Windows SideShow Release Candidate announced!
Just got the mail from the Windows Sideshow team that have released the RC version of Media Center gadgets for Windows Sideshow has been released.
Here is what the mail reads-
Download the Release Candidate build of the Windows Media Center Gadgets for Windows SideShow here:
(download links removed, you would be only able to download only if you were approved earlier to test the product)
Please install this build and provide feedback. The final release will be posted to the Windows Live Gallery in the near future.
While you are there, check out some of the great new gadgets that have been uploaded including Remotebook (for Facebook), AccuWeather, Twitter, System Health and Windows Live Messenger (all available in 9 languages)!
Support for Media Center Extenders:
Extenders are now supported if you are using a SideShow device that can pre-enable the gadgets. The Ricavision Vave100 remote control is an example of a device that pre-enables the Media Center gadgets.
Try this with your Xbox 360 or other extender device and provide us with any feedback. Additional instructions have been added to the Installation Instructions page about using the gadgets with an extender.
Connect Site Links:
Installation Instructions
Gadget general information and known issues
Send Feedback
Want to write your own Gadget in Managed Code? It’s easy!
You can download and install our easy to use SDK, which includes templates for a gadget that integrate with Visual Studio (2005/2008 including express editions). You can build and run the template Gadget right out of the box giving you an easy place to start to tailor your own gadget. Download this today from Microsoft Download Center:
Windows SideShow Managed API 1.0 SDK
Have a Windows Mobile 5 or 6 phone?
Download and install Windows SideShow for Windows Mobile Developer Preview
Your feedback has greatly increased the quality of this release! Thank you so very much from our entire team for taking part in the Windows Media Center Gadgets for Windows SideShow Beta.
Thank you!
The Windows SideShow team
Windows Live Wave 3 beta urls show up
You won’t be able to sign in to any of the beta sites yet if you’re not on the approved list (the betas haven’t started yet if you’re worried), but here’s a few gems we learnt while digging around.
What’s great is that now new features can be tested before being rolled out to the general public, something which Spaces has needed ever since one of its updates rendered the service unusable for several weeks.
Windows Live Home Beta (http://home-beta.live.com) – As mentioned above, softies are clicking through to us from this site, thanks to the new homepage having default groups of feeds that users can subscribe to. Looks like this new homepage could have similar features to my.live.com, so it’ll be interesting to see how much functionality they duplicate.
Windows Live Profile Beta (http://profile-beta.live.com) – Sorry Jason and Sabina but you’re our demos (everybody else had personal photos up). You can see from these feeds that photo albums are now stored on Skydrive. That means you can now use your Skydrive storage across multiple services, which should please a lot of people.
Windows Live Photos Beta (http://photos-beta.live.com) – The front-end user interface to the photos stored on Skydrive, see below. This means you now start to share your 5GB of storage across Windows Live services, which hopefully is a sign of further consolidation in the storage area. Lets face it, we have too much scattered storage already (about 30GB worth!)
Windows Live Skydrive Beta (http://skydrive-beta.live.com) – With photos going to be stored on Skydrive, there’s more privacy options you can set, as shown by the new icon below. This means photos won’t necessarily be visible to the public, giving users some control over content that’s currently lacking in the existing Spaces photo albums.
And for completeness, the urls of the other beta sites:
Windows Live Groups Beta (http://groups-beta.live.com), Windows Live Spaces Beta (http://spaces-beta.live.com) and Windows Live Events Beta (http://events-beta.live.com)
Source- Liveside
Translation powered by….Microsoft Translator!
Our team is celebrating a major milestone today - last week we successfully transitioned all of our translation services to technology developed right here in Microsoft Research!
As some of you may have noticed, up until last week, some of our languages were still supported by a third party technology for general domain requests. Here’s the summary of what this release means:
- Translation now fully powered by the Microsoft Translator technology is available through Live Search, as well as IE8, the Windows Live Toolbar, and Windows Live Messenger.
- All translation pairs on the site (11 English-X, 12 X-English) are powered by Microsoft Research-developed systems.
- Two transliteration pairs (chs<->cht), courtesy of the Windows International team.
- For several languages, better language quality.
- And finally, the release of TBot, a translation bot for Windows Live Messenger.
This release is the combination of all the effort that the team has put into machine translation, not only over the past months, but literally over the past years.
Source- MSDN Blog
