I've spoken previously about
Windows Live Contacts but never really did much with it. I didn't have an immediate use for it and I was growing increasingly apathetic about the entire area of contact grabbers / importers. It was a shame really as it was a really exciting project with Microsoft leading the way in the area. It's been only recently that Google and Yahoo have caught up and released their own APIs for accessing their users data.
I've
moaned about how great it would be if we could get a users contacts without having to ask for their password. With services like Windows Live Contacts this is finally possible
With the possibility of actually using the code myself creeping up on the horizon I decided to put the time in to write wrappers for PHP. It can be broken down into two components.
Windows Live Delegated Authentication The first thing we need to do is get permission from the user to access their data. There was already a PHP wrapper for this but it did far more than I needed so I've rewritten it and ignored the parts I don't expect to need. This evening I
submitted it to the PEAR proposal process.
Windows Live Contacts The second step is fetching the contacts for the user after you have their permission. I could only find a small test script for this so a more complete implementation was definitely needed. Again, I've just
submitted the code for this to the PEAR proposal process.
Both of these packages will likely undergo changes as they go through the proposal process but if you can't wait to get started the files are available to be installed now on the proposal pages. The easiest way is using the PEAR installer. If you haven't used PEAR before please take a look at
the manual. If you're still unsure of anything post a comment below.
