I'm a little late in blogging this but last week the Windows Live SDK silently launched. What's in the SDK? All of this goodness

Kudos to Jim Gordon, Kevin Ledley, Koji and all the others who pulled together to get this out. I actually did some work on this as well. I updated the documentation on the Windows Live Spaces MetaWeblog API to account for the very recently announced Windows Live ID 1.0 Client SDK. Finally, non-Microsoft applications can talk to Windows Live and MSN services that require Passport Windows Live ID authentication without having to sell their souls to the B0rg cube. Now we just ask for a pound of flesh. ;)

Seriously though, I'd been watching Yahoo! and Google's forays with BBAuth and Google Account Authentication with some jealousy so it is with a lot of gladness that I welcome this move. If you are an application developer that is interested in building an application that accesses user data from Windows Live services then download the Windows Live ID Client SDK 1.0 alpha release and share your feedback with the Live ID folks on the Windows Live ID development forum. Authentication is a fundamental building block of any API story that we have with regards to accessing and manipulating user data so it is important that we get it right and get feedback from developers out there.

Let us know what you think.