Hello Developers and Partners of Windows Live Agents,

We are pleased to announce the public release of our new SDK for Visual Studio.  We have been in limited beta of the Colloquis SDK for quite some time and are excited to release this new technology to the public.  This new release of our SDK, as well as our Platform, marks an important step in building the Agents developer community.  We’ve been publishing weekly updates to this blog for almost a year, as well as supporting developers through our MSDN Forum, so we’re hopeful that we’ve gotten all your feedback and input handled in this newest release.  In addition to the release of the Platform and SDK, we’re also releasing our new system for hosting Agents at Microsoft, PHI (Partner Hosting Infrastructure).  With PHI, the previous method of mailing a project manager or an alias will be replaced by submitting your Agents through an automated system, receiving status on your project, and administering all your projects through a single console.  Hosting of your Agent will require a nominal yearly fee that offsets hardware costs (prices starting at ~$10k USD/year).  If you are working in partnership with Windows Live or MSN, that fee will likely be waived as part of your development contract on the product you are delivering.

I highly recommend you read the release notes below for important process related questions for Agent development, as well as our SDK Documentation. There is important information about how to use PHI, the IDE, and what guidelines you must follow in order to develop in this community.  As we’ve noted in earlier blog posts, the older standard of MSN Bot is no longer supported, or certified by Microsoft.  Windows Live Agents replaces the terminology, technology, guidelines, and processes under which many of you have operated in the past, but we believe we’ve spoken about this at great length and have given our partners a chance to migrate effectively.  The users of Messenger and Windows Live ID are protected by Microsoft’s global policy and we’re ensuring that Agents on our network are held to the highest standard in online safety by using the Agents SDK for development.  Development of an Agent on the Agents SDK does not ensure that an Agent will be hosted by Microsoft, pending content reviews and approvals by the policy and safety teams.

While we have many partners that work closely with the Agents team today, we are actively seeking new professional vendors that use this SDK to partner with us and the MSN Markets.  If you have been working with an MSN Market already, please send an email to wlabiz@microsoft.com to let us know the Agents you’ve developed and the people you’ve been in contact with at MSN.  Our development team is always recommending partners for vendor work in different regions.  We’ll be formalizing these partnerships under the Microsoft Partner Program in the future, but welcome the on-boarding of new development teams that can build Agents for online media needs. 

Any questions that you have on the release, the process, or the software, should be posted on the MSDN Forum.  The previous alias used by many today will be monitored, but replies will be limited to developers that are explicitly directed there.

We look forward to seeing the innovation from your development teams!

Best,

Windows Live Agents development team

Here are the relevant links for download and information:

·         SDK

·         SDK Documentation

·         PHI

·         Development Blog

·         MSDN Forum

New Features and Processes in Windows Live Agents 5.0

·         Visual Studio SDK

o   We will be retiring the old standalone Colloquis SDK (versions 4.3 and previous) within 90 days of our 5.0 release. The process by which you take your previously developed projects and update them will be discussed with our release notes, but we want to ensure that developers have Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 Standard (or above) prior to the release of our Agents plug-in.  Please subscribe to Alerts on our blog page for availability of the SDK as we will be posting the announcement there.

·         Partner Hosting Infrastructure (PHI)

o   We are streamlining the process by which projects can be hosted within Microsoft, if you choose to be hosted with us.  The old method of contacting a project manager within Microsoft will be replaced with our PHI system.  Within PHI, you will be submitting your Agents through an automated system, receiving status on your project, and administering all your projects through a single console.  Hosting of your Agent will require a nominal yearly fee that offsets hardware costs. We will be updating folks on the pricing model in the near future on our blog and through Windows Live development announcements, but it’s likely you’ll be able to waive these hosting fees if you are working with an MSN Market.  Microsoft will only host Agents that are developed within the languages that are supported by the SDK (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese; Portuguese and Dutch will release in the next few months).

·         Agent Provisioning

o   As part of the ongoing safety for our end-users, the ability to have a Windows Live ID provisioned as an Agent will require that the Windows Live Agent SDK is used for development of your Agent.  The previous method of submitting through Windows Live Gallery is no longer supported and will soon be removed from the system all together.  Provisioning an Agent lifts the limit of contacts within Windows Live Messenger, but will be enforced strictly to ensure our Platform is in use.

·         Compliance

o   The Windows Live Agents SDK is now enforcing Policy Compliance in all responses from an Agent hosted by Microsoft.  What this means to you as a developer is that your Agent may not respond with the exact text that you had scripted during your development.  When an Agent is hosted by Microsoft, we’ll have an additional set of tools that runs against your code to ensure that the response is appropriate for any and all users of Messenger.  We are holding our developers to the highest standards in online safety and will be posting blog entries on how you can safeguard your code within the SDK prior to Windows Live hosting.  You will be able to easily mimic the production conversation during development with these tools, so you can be sure your Agent is compliant with online safety guidelines.  If you are working with an MSN Market or Microsoft product, you will be hosted by Microsoft and subject to these tools.

·         Self-Hosting

o   As you are downloading the new SDK, you may run this free version with your production Agent, in your own environment.  There are limitations on sessions within this self-host model, as well as some other limitations in terms of high availability deployments, but it is almost exactly the same product as we would host for you through PHI.  This is an ideal setup for the smaller development teams that do not have SLA’s on their Agent and wish to prototype features.  We have found this scenario to easily handle a large percentage of Agent traffic in the field today.  Again, this model enforces that the Agent SDK is in place to connect to Messenger as a provisioned Agent.

IDE

We have completely moved away from the custom made IDE that all projects up to the 4.3 release of our platform used. Instead, we now have a solution fully integrated in Visual Studio as an add-in.

Full details on the new IDE are found in our documentation and on our blog.  Some quick highlights of features to look out for:

·         Conversation and comprehension windows redesigned to better show the inner workings of how query matches are done

·         Solution explorer to navigate your project

·         Colorization and IntelliSense support

·         Object browser for viewing all objects declared in your project

·         Full integration with our Partner Hosting Infrastructure (PHI). For example, seamlessly check in and check out your PHI projects.

·         And more…

Migrating a Project from 4.3 to 5.0

We have developed a script that helps to convert a project from 4.3 and make it compatible with our 5.0 release. The script basically creates a .connections file based on the language dependencies it reads in from the .dls file, updates obsolete references to the old Buddyscript libraries, and updates the .dls file.

An important thing to note is that the script will overwrite your current project directory. To be safe, you should backup your project directory before running the script.

The script is located in your Windows Live Agents SDK install directory (default location is in Program Files) at:

Windows Live Agents SDK\Projects\ProjectConversion\ConvertProjectTo5_0.bat

Drag and drop the project directory you wish to convert onto the .bat file, or double click the .bat file and enter the project directory path.

Note: The conversion script will not necessarily  address every issue. You will most likely have to do some manual work after running the conversion script. But it will still save you quite a bit of work.

PHI

Overview

Partner Hosting Infrastructure, or PHI, is a tool that will allow developers to apply for Microsoft to host their Agent projects. Developers will be able to upload their code, manage projects, and be informed of the current state of their projects.  This section will go over the tools that developers have available to them when developing a project, taking it live, and making changes to project files.

It allows developers to :

·         Submit a project application

·         Check in code for that Project

·         Stage and Test your Project

·         Go Live with your Project

How to modify your Project

Once your project is hosted at Microsoft, you have two options available to you when you would like to modify files in your project.

Using the Console

You can use the KMS Console at https://sampleProj.console.agents.live.com  to modify the project. This will allow you to edit topics and responses fairly easily. For more control, however, you would want to use the IDE to make project changes.

Using the IDE

You can use the IDE to check in files in the same way that you checked in the project originally. Please note that using the IDE will check in an entire project, and does not allow you to check in just a single file.

To check out using the IDE, you must first sign in with your Windows Live ID and acquire a project lock by clicking on Tools à Windows Live Agents Tools à Code Management à Check Out Project. You can then edit whichever files you wish. While a project is checked out to you, no one will be able to edit any of the project files using the IDE or KMS.

To check in, click on Tools à Windows Live Agents Tools à Code Management à Check In Project.

Checking In the Connections File

When you check in the connections file, it must be reviewed and approved before being hosted or going live in the data center. Check in the connections file as you would check in any other file (see directions above).

Checking in your project when the .connections file has not been modified will not trigger a review. Those changes should propagate immediately.