www.viawindowslive.com Beta is Live!
I am pleased to announce the Beta ofhttp://www.viawindowslive.com is now Live!
Taking the concepts ofDr Neil Roodyn andTatham Oddie'sViaVirtualEarth to the next level,ViaWindowsLive promises to be the number one resource for Windows Live developers.
Many thanks toBronwen Zande for help with configuring the site and the new design byTricky Business.
The site provides essentials likegetting started,community contributed articles, agallery of Live sites,wiki,resource links as well as aggregatedblogs andforums.
Each technology has its own homepage:
http://www.viawindowslive.com/VirtualEarth.aspx
http://www.viawindowslive.com/SilverlightStreaming.aspx
http://www.viawindowslive.com/Messenger.aspx
http://www.viawindowslive.com/LiveSpaces.aspx
http://www.viawindowslive.com/LiveSearch.aspx
http://www.viawindowslive.com/LiveID.aspx
http://www.viawindowslive.com/LiveContacts.aspx
http://www.viawindowslive.com/Gadgets.aspx
http://www.viawindowslive.com/Expo.aspx
http://www.viawindowslive.com/CustomDomains.aspx
http://www.viawindowslive.com/Alerts.aspx
I would value any feedback you have at all, and feel free to register and start contributing content. Currently you can submit and manage your own sites in the gallery. I’m in the process of setting up the wiki to be a little more organised and for articles you need to contact me to setup your own page.
John O’Brien
Windows Live Developer MVP
Hey John,
Great site I've noticed some empty space in the "articles" section when the page first loads. There's a big gap of space to the right of the "virtaul earth/silverlight streaming/messenger" tab which forces the user to scroll down to view the content below it. It seems as though the "home" page is the only section that isn't affected by this but fixing this would make the page much more intuitive.
On another note I'm running 1440x900 resolution and when I have the site displayed on a full screen it doesn't seem to make use of the full resolution? (around 40% of the screen used to display content, the rest is white space) It might help to left justify and expand the content box to the right side more.
Regards,
Thanks Derek!
Yes our priority was getting a base design up (fixed width) and then laying out the content. Although we have a bunch of stuff from the ViaVE site and MSDN we have a big task ahead of us to put together the definitive content on all Live services.
The good news is we already have a handful of people volunteering to help in all sorts of areas.
So I'll see if a can post about a roadmap soon, variable width is a must, I have a nice Dell 24" @ 1920x1200 myself 
In terms of intuitive navigation the issue we face is we have moved up a step covering all technologies not just VE, the big suggestions we have had so far are:
Any thoughts? Those two are quite easy to put in.
John.
