New In The Windows Live Contacts Control: Incremental Search!

Another month, another release!  This month we've added incremental search to the contacts and presence controls to make it easier to find a particular contact in your haystack of hundreds of family, friends, and coworkers.  Just type in a few letters of the name or word you're looking for, and the control will reduce the list of displayed contacts to only those that contain that letter sequence, anywhere in the contact display name, case insensitive. 

Check it out in our little control testbed apps:  <dev.live.com/mashups/trycontactscontrol> and <dev.live.com/mashups/trypresencecontrol>

While we were at it, we also added support for filtering the list by group as well.  Click on the dropdown button to the right of the search box to select from a list of groups you have defined in your addressbook.  In the Contacts Control in tile view, you can also filter by online state, to display only your buddies that are online, for example.

We've cleaned up the control UI a bit, too. The info panel below the contacts list didn't get favorable reviews from the field, so we've removed it to make room for displaying more contacts in our always-cramped-for-display-real-estate web control.  The edit and delete buttons that bordered the info panel have been moved to the display contact details page.  You really ought to review the details before editing or deleting anyway, so putting them all on the same page makes sense.

What do you need to do to pick up these new features?  Nothing!  It's an inline release on the v0.3 version.  As long as you're referencing <controls.services.live.com/scripts/base/v0.3/live.js> and <controls.services.live.com/scripts/base/v0.3/controls.js> in your web page, you'll get these enhancements and refinements for free.

Enjoy!

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 08, 2007
  As Danny mentioned on his blog - we have released a new version of the Windows Live Contacts control(s).

• Anonymous
  August 08, 2007
  As Danny mentioned on his blog - we have released a new version of the Windows Live Contacts control

• Anonymous
  August 14, 2007
  Nice enhancements..the group filtering is really useful.

• Anonymous
  August 15, 2007
  I was out of the office last week on vacation (check out our awesome seaplane ride to Victoria !), and

• Anonymous
  August 15, 2007
  I was out of the office last week on vacation (check out our awesome seaplane ride to Victoria !), and

• Anonymous
  August 20, 2007
  Microsoft looks to have added another company to its growing group of Windows Live partners with Reuters