Fixing an issue with Windows Live Toolbar and Favorites Sync

Originally posted on my old MSDN blog

I’ve always used the Windows Live Toolbar to sync favorites across my multiple machines, so it was a bit disappointing when the previous beta removed that functionality with the demise of http://favorites.live.com

That meant I was pleased to see the service had been added to the latest beta of the toolbar in the new Windows Live Essentials pack, but then very frustrated when it failed to install properly on a couple of my PCs.

However after a bit of playing about I stumbled on a fix, so I thought I’d share the solution here as I couldn’t find any other references online.

After setting up the sync on my work laptop, after what I thought was a successful install on my home PC there was no option for setting up the sync in the left hand side of Toolbar options - see the picture below:

I had no idea what the problem was, and was going to try the trusted uninstall/reinstall route, but when I went to the uninstall control panel I realised I still had the old Favorites toolbar add-in installed:

On one PC simply uninstalling the “Windows Live Favorites for Windows Live Toolbar” did the trick, and the sync options magically appeared.

On another PC I had to reinstall the toolbar too, but then finally I was in sync across all my PCs.

I hope you found that helpful!

Update (23/12/2008): There has been some discussion on Liveside about this issue that you should check out. One thing I didn’t know is that the Favorites sync isn’t available in all markets at the moment.

Update 2 (18/02/2009): I’ve upgraded a couple of machines to Windows 7 and on one of them I just couldn’t get the sync to appear. They were both fresh installs so the issue above didn’t fix it. I also made sure everything on the failing machine was “en-us”, but to no avail.

Actually I was getting frustrated with the way the sync wouldn’t handle deletes properly, so I’ve given up and am just using the superior Live Mesh to sync my favorites directory.

Linking Fire Eagle and Twitter

Originally posted on my old MSDN blog

The next stage in my plan to let the whole world know where I am has been to hook up my Fire Eagle location to Twitter, so every time my location changes a Tweet is sent to everyone following me.

I thought for a while about hooking up my code to Twitter using the Twitter API, but then realised there is a much simpler way.

1. Expose my Fire Eagle location via an RSS feed
2. Use TwitterFeed to post changes to the feed to my Twitter account

For the RSS feed part, it was relatively simple to adapt my existing code to make my own feed, but there are several existing Fire Eagle services that will do this for you.

Then TwitterFeed – which is a simple but excellent service – does the work of watching the feed for updates, and then posting any changes to my Twitter feed.

All pretty simple in the end.

Some fairly vaguely related thoughts…

1. The power of both Twitter and Fire Eagle are only really exposed by the services and applications that use them. Fire Eagle is designed specifically to work in that way, but my use of Twitter has really taken off since finding applications like TwitterFeed and Tweet Deck.

2. I’m really impressed with the updated Windows Live web sites, and in particular the web activities. It’s great that my tweets are now exposed to my contacts who are much less likely to use Twitter. Although after the work I’ve done above means I don’t really need it, it would be fantastic if Fire Eagle was a future web activity.

3. TwitterFeed used Open ID as it’s authentication scheme, and it was the first time I’d used it. If I didn’t have half an idea what was going on it would have been a very confusing experience. All the talk of “what’s your URL?” didn’t make any sense until I realised I could just go to Yahoo! and use my account there to generate my ID. Definitely wouldn’t have passed the “can your Mom use it?” test.

P.S. If you want to follow me on Twitter, you can at http://twitter.com/yeltzland

Using Fire Eagle to store your current location

Originally posted on my old MSDN blog

Not that you’d really notice, but I’ve updated the code to show my current location on the map on this blog to use Fire Eagle to store my current location.

If you haven’t heard of it before, Fire Eagle is a service provided by Yahoo! which lets you store your current location, and then allow different applications read or write access that location at an accuracy level that you control.

This is a simple service which is actually really cool, and there are already multiple applications on different platforms (web, client and mobile) which allow you to read and/or update your location dynamically. So if you really want to – and I do! – you can track and expose your location however you want.

The full developer details are at http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/developer (you need a Yahoo! account to access this) so I won’t explain too many of the low-level details here. However here’s a few things to note if you want to investigate yourself:

1. Fire Eagle uses OAuth for securing access to their API, which means:

• First get the application token by registering your application at Fire Eagle
• Using the application token you get a request token for an individual user, from which a URL is created to send the user to Fire Eagle to both confirm access permissions to their location for your application, and at the level of accuracy the application may show
• Once the user has confirmed permission, your application gets a user-specific token which it should store and use to access the Fire Eagle API to get that user’s location

2. There are various libraries available for both OAuth and Fire Eagle access:

• I used the C# Fire Eagle library at Google Code
• However there are a couple of bugs in the library that I had to fix:
  • The response can’t be serialised properly because the Error object uses IDictionary which can’t be serialised
  • A couple of the values in the location hierarchy - “exact” and “region” weren’t available
• Also, the library didn’t expose the latitude and longitude of the locations returned – the main thing I was interested in so I could display the position on my Virtual Earth map!
• Update (8th Dec 2008) I’ve checked in fixes for both issues and the library extensions I made to the code repository at http://code.google.com/p/fireeaglenet/ If you find any problems, let me know and I’ll take a look ASAP.

Once all of the access token details have been obtained and stored in my web.config file (I know, not the most secure practice and not one I’d use on a real production site), then using the C# library it’s very easy to get my location with a few lines of code:

  Token userToken = new Token(appSettings["fireeagle_usertoken"], appSettings["fireeagle_usersecret"]);
  FireEagle fireEagle = new FireEagle(appSettings["fireeagle_consumertoken"], appSettings["fireeagle_consumersecret"], userToken);
  User fireEagleUser = fireEagle.User();
  Location bestLocation = fireEagleUser.LocationHierarchy.BestGuess;

I can then use that Location object (after my extension to the library) to get the latitude and longitude to drive my JavaScript implementation of Virtual Earth shown in an earlier post.

As an aside – which I may come back to in a future post – I wanted to protect some of the pages I built (the ones where I expose my Fire Eagle token details). To do this I used Windows Live ID using code from the Web Authentication SDK – see http://dev.live.com/liveid/ for details.

This was almost trivially easy, and having banged my head against earlier Passport implementations, this was a pleasure to use (if that’s not overstating things!). Kudos to the Live ID team, and if you’ve been put off using WLID after being scarred by previous attempts with Passport, I definitely recommend taking another look.

Super-fast MSDN

Originally posted on my old MSDN blog

I got this tip in the pub on Friday from my friend Bobby who works on the MSDN team. He told me he’d worked on implementing a low bandwidth version of the site, which is simpler and much, much faster than usual view.

I’d never heard of this, but a quick Live Search found a few relevant blog posts, including an excellent post explaining this feature and quite a bit more on John Galloway's blog.

I’d definitely recommend checking out that article, but the key point is simply add “(loband)” before the “.aspx” in any MSDN library URL e.g. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object(loband).aspx

You can also set a cookie that can persist this view for future calls to MSDN without having to insert the (loband) part.

I’m sure many people who spend a lot of time in the MSDN libraries (including myself) will definitely find this feature very useful. This should definitely be publicised more widely!

Showing my current location using Virtual Earth

Originally posted on my old MSDN blog

As I’m often switching location between my home in the UK and working out in Redmond, I’ve been thinking for a while about how best to easily let people know where I am. As you can hopefully see, I’ve added a map to every page on this blog and I thought that maybe people might be interested how I did this, as I learnt a few things on the way that were reasonably interesting.

The first challenge was to figure out the best way around the limitations of adding a map to the blog page. Although the Community Server software that this site runs on is pretty flexible, you can only add elements to every page in various sections – in my case in the News section. Luckily there don’t appear to be any restrictions on the actual HTML you can add, so I was left with a choice of options.

My first thought was to add an <IFRAME… /> section that would call out to a page on my own server that would use Windows Live Maps to display where I am by adding a pushpin at the appropriate location. However this didn’t really work very well, as the map code didn’t really like being in an IFrame and the flow of the page around the map was broken.

Therefore the solution I hit on was to add the following code:

<h3>LIVE LOCATION</h3>
<div id='myMap' style="position:relative; width:150px; height:200px;"></div>
<script type<="text/javascript" src="http://www.metanetsolutions.co.uk/mapscript.aspx?mapElement=myMap" defer="true"></script>

The ‘myMap’ element is the div where the map will be placed by the JavaScript that I create on my server. Note that I am passing the name of this element into my script so I can use it.

Interesting point to note is adding the defer=true on to the script call. Without it, I was occasionally hitting a known issue in Internet Explorer due to a bug in the IE parser :-(

The ASPX page that generates the JavaScript is shown below. I won’t show the pretty simple code behind just yet, as I’m hoping to add more functionality to this soon before I share the code. However in this initial version it just creates a “LocationEntry” object from an XML file held on the server, and then uses this object to set various parts of the script.

The interesting things of note in the JavaScript are:

• Note the excellent "delayed loading of the map code" that was written by Soul Solutionsthat I used here. This:
  • Sets an animated GIF as the background to the map div while the code is loading
  • Dynamically adds the Virtual Earth required JavaScript files to the head element of the page
  • Sets a callback to the function to setup the map once the VE API scripts have loaded
• The onscriptload callback function removes the dashboard and scalebar to make the map cleaner, sets the zoom level – defaults to 10 but can be overwritten by setting a zoom=n on the query parameters to the page request, and then simply adds a pushpin at the location set by the LocationEntry in the code behind

Hopefully this is pretty self-explanatory – see http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/ for more details about the Virtual Earth API.

Here’s the ASPX/JavaScript code:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="MapScript.aspx.cs" Inherits="DefaultPage" %>
var mapElementName = '<%= this.MapElementName %>';
var mapControlVersion = '6.2';

// Dynamic loading script from http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/examples/VE62/loadondemand.htm
var loaded = false;
var map = null;

function onscriptload()
{
    // Get rid of our load animation
    document.getElementById(mapElementName).style.background = "";

    var locationLatLong = new VELatLong(<%= this.CurrentLocation.Latitude %>, <%= this.CurrentLocation.Longitude %>);
    map = new VEMap(mapElementName);
    map.LoadMap(locationLatLong, 1, VEMapStyle.Road, true, VEMapMode.Mode2D, false, 0);
    map.HideDashboard();
    map.HideScalebar();
    map.SetZoomLevel(<%= this.MapZoomLevel %>);

    AddLocationPushpin(locationLatLong);
}

function loadVEAPI()
{
    if (!loaded)
    {
      loaded = true;

      // Set a nice animated gif to show the map is loading
      document.getElementById(mapElementName).style.background = "url(images/ajax-loader.gif) center center no-repeat";
      
      if (!(window.attachEvent))
      {
        appendJS("http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/v" + mapControlVersion + "/js/atlascompat.js");
      }

      appendJS("http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v="+ mapControlVersion + "&onScriptLoad=onscriptload");
    }
}

function appendJS(filename)
{
    var fileref = document.createElement('script');
    fileref.setAttribute("type", "text/javascript");
    fileref.setAttribute("src", filename);
    document.getElementsByTagName("head"[0].appendChild(fileref);
}

function AddLocationPushpin(myLocation)
{
    map.SetCenter(myLocation);

    var myPushpin = new VEShape(VEShapeType.Pushpin, myLocation);

    myPushpin.SetTitle("<%= this.CurrentLocation.Title %>");

    var description = "<p><%= this.CurrentLocation.Description %></p>";
    description += "<p><%= this.CurrentLocation.UpdateTime.ToString("u<") %></p>";
    myPushpin.SetDescription(description);

    map.AddShape(myPushpin);
}

// Start the loading
loadVEAPI();

Future plans (which I suspect are overly ambitious!) for this application involve:

• A JavaScript and VE enabled form to easily update my location
• Mesh-enabling the application
• Hooking up my GPS so I can automatically update my location when I’m on the move
• Possibly hooking everything up to FireEagle