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Sunday, May 11, 2008 5:55 PM

Windows Live Agents Testing: Introduction

Developing a Windows Live Agent is much like developing any software solution. Your team creates code, you test it, the customer tests it from the user side, you fix bugs and add functionality, and the cycle goes on until you're finished. Although...
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Wednesday, April 16, 2008 10:34 PM

Windows Live Agents: Non-UTF8 encodings

One problem we've recently found is that the current version of the SDK has limited support for XML encodings other than UTF8. In fact, the encoding attribute in the XML files seems to be just ignored. We are reading spanish encoded XMLs (ISO-8859...
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Thursday, April 03, 2008 8:04 AM

Windows Live Agents: XML Normalization II

In my last WLA post I talked about normalizing xmls to be able to handle complex structures. We learned how splitting the fields in multiple xmls we could do simple querys and get the wanted data. But what about after having this data? How can we cross...
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Monday, March 24, 2008 11:44 PM

Windows Live Agents: XML Normalization

Buddyscript is capable of managing xmls with ease, and accessing external databases for example with a web service. But sometimes we may need to have non-trivial xmls locally, and those xmls may have complex structures not so easy to handle. This is the...
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008 12:03 AM

Windows Live Agents: Matching international characters in XMLs

When we use XMLs, they come with UTF-8 encoding, so there is no problem in storing into them international characters, like for example the spanish word "España". We may have for example an XML with a list of countries written in spanish, and...
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Monday, March 03, 2008 11:15 AM

Working happy and with humour == working better

I've only been working for near 6 years, but I've been in 4 different companies and lots of customers, so I've "tasted" very heterogeneous "work ecosystems". I love my work, and I enjoy a lot developing, so whenever I can...
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Saturday, March 01, 2008 11:20 AM

Windows Live Agents: iZ v1.1 - Taking advantage of user feedback

Yesterday an update for iZ, our first WLA was uploaded and applied. The agent now writes in red color! :D Now, seriously, we've made some improvements. One good thing about internet is that you can get early feedback from the users. We received bad...
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Thursday, February 28, 2008 2:22 AM

Windows Live Agents: iZ, our first WLA

Today it's been just launched our first public WLA! Although really is the second one the first is in it's final touches with the customer, but we expect to have it ready quite soon too. The agent's name is iZ@psoe.es and it has been made...
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Tuesday, February 26, 2008 7:38 AM

Windows Live Agents: Anything patterns II

In a previous post we talked about basic use of the Anything pattern. One "poltergeist" issue we may face is having an Anything pattern not catching long, multiple word user inputs. In our specific case it was only taking up to 4 word street...
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Sunday, February 17, 2008 12:30 PM

Windows Live Agents: Anything patterns

As you will have noticed, having a lot of work making WLAs means lot's of incoming posts about the topic. I've planned at least another two or three more, but I'll try to talk about other topics too. Anyway, let's get to the topic. Sometimes...
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Tuesday, February 12, 2008 10:31 AM

Messenger instant chat HTML tags

Mini-post as reminder. The four special HTML tags to allow chatting with a contact or Agent from an hiperlink, add it to your contact list and other stuff: <a href="msnim:chat?contact=sample@email.com">Chat</a> <a href="msnim...
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Saturday, February 09, 2008 11:57 PM

Windows Live Agents: SCount Function (Safe Count)

Buddyscript has objects, but internally they are n-dimensional arrays of strings. They can have properties, like real objects, but have some limitations. One I've come across recently was that the Buddyscript " for each " can't iterate...
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Monday, January 28, 2008 8:52 PM

Windows Live Agents: Default topics & capabilities

Today I've had to build a list for a customer of what topics a default agent supports (and should be revised by the customer to adapt their agent to their wishes). The list is based on the english template (with chitchat & userinfo modules activated...
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Thursday, January 10, 2008 9:33 PM

Windows Live Agents: Structuring and Refactoring the code

In order to implement correctly structured code for a Windows Live Agent, we should remember that the /Shared folder exists and what its purpose is. If we want to access an RSS feed and display its contents, the data access code (at least) should be placed...
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Thursday, December 27, 2007 11:40 AM

Building a Windows Live Agent: First steps

Starting with this post I'm going to not only provide general tips & tricks about WLAs, but actually showing how the IDE works and the process of building an agent. I'm going to develop the agent fully and just using the 5.0 SDK, which is...
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