New Domains for Windows Live Web Controls
Our little web controls are growing up so fast! We've migrated the Windows Live Contacts web control and Windows Live Spaces web control to new servers in the Microsoft datacenters and a new domain name: controls.services.live.com.
The web controls will continue to work on the old domain name (dev.live.com) during the beta period for existing apps, but you should consider updating your web apps to use the new URL as soon as possible. Why? Better performance! The new configuration serves up the controls faster than ever.
Moving to new physical servers in the Microsoft data centers could have been done without a code-breaking domain name change (the old servers were not in MS data centers, fwiw), but we decided now was the best time to bite the bullet and make the domain name change. The new controls.services.live.com domain name aligns with the Windows Live Services platform map rolled out at MIX07 this past April, and allows us to make a clean separation between information content and live web services. dev.live.com will continue to be the developer information portal on how to use Windows Live services in your applications. The actual services your code talks to will be under *.services.live.com. This will also help prevent sudden surges in web traffic on the content site from affecting the performance of the web services themselves.
Make the Switch
To switch your web apps to use the new servers, you need to change script tags referencing dev.live.com to controls.services.live.com, and change v0.2 to v0.3 in the URL path:
<script type="text/javascript"
src="dev.live.com/scripts/base/v0.2/live.js">
becomes
<script type="text/javascript"
src="controls.services.live.com/scripts/base/v0.3/live.js">
In addition, if your code still references dev.live.com/scripts/contacts/v0.2/control.js, change that to controls.services.live.com/scripts/base/v0.3/controls.js. Note that the old file was singular "control", whereas the new version is plural "controls". The old file (singular) only knew how to bootstrap the Contacts control. The new file (plural) has been refactored so that it can recognize and bootstrap multiple different Windows Live web controls on a page. One script reference to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. Or something like that.
While you're cleaning out cobwebs, it'd be a good idea to copy the latest channel.htm to your server. We've made a few minor adjustments to it for bug fixes, stability and performance that you should get.
Bonus!
Also new with this v0.3 release: New languages for the Windows Live Spaces web control! The Spaces control now supports the same 10 languages as the Contacts control: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Chinese Simplified
Enjoy!
Comments
Anonymous
June 14, 2007
As Danny Thorpe mentioned on his blog , the Windows Live controls have been moved onto new hardware awayAnonymous
June 14, 2007
Hi Danny, Good post & thanks for the update. I just wanted to clarify a couple of bits that may help some others as well before I go ahead and 'Make the switch' for the contacts control... The live.js file I'm using is at: http://dev.live.com/scripts/base/v0.2/live.js (as opposed to .../v0.2/base/...) which I assume goes to: http://controls.services.live.com/scripts/base/v0.3/live.js ? Also - I'm guessing here - but should we also change the XML namespace reference in the <html> tag from xmlns:devlive="http://dev.live.com" to, perhaps: xmlns:live="http://controls.services.live.com" (and change the control tag to <live:contactscontrol.... from <devlive:contactscontrol...) Thanks, MarkAnonymous
June 18, 2007
Mark: Ack! Typo! You're right - those URLs should be /base/v0.x, not the other way around. Thanks for the note - I've updated the article with the corrected URLs. As for the XML namespaces - do not change them. Namespaces are just names, not actual URLs or files on some server. The namespaces will remain http://dev.live.com. Thanks for the feedback! -Danny