At last week’s Mix 06, Microsoft announced the launch of their Windows Live Developer Central. There’s lots of cool stuff available there if you’re interested in developing apps using Windows Live Services.

From Windows Live Developer Central website:

The Windows Live Platform puts a deeper level of control into developers’ hands by offering access to the core services and data through open, easily accessible APIs. Start building applications and mashups today with Windows Live.

The site has spme pretty useful information and resources that enables people to start building applications using the easily accessible APIs:

• MetaWeblog API programming interface for MSN Spaces for external programs to get and set the text and attributes of Weblog posts.
• Getting Started with Virtual Earth’s rich and easy to implement set of interfaces to get it running on your site

There’s also a link to the Channel 9 video where Scott Swanson is interviewed by Robert Scoble about the Messenger Activity APIs and other Messenger-related demos.

Also, I stumbled upon this transcript of Bill Gates’s opening keynote at Mix06 featuring Aber Whitcom from MySpace and Ashley Highfield from the BBC. At the end of the speech, there was a dicussion between BillG and Tim O’Reilly that makes quite an interesting read. (btw, MySpace uses SQL Server and Tim O’Reilly’s Safari books online service runs on SQL Server and ASP.NET )