I'm here in sunny Las Vegas attending the Mix conference. Last night I was at the mashup social hour (mashups + free martinis = goodness), and am looking forward to tonight's Mashup After Hours.  This is an event / contest with some great prizes for folks to show off your mashup skills (or if just starting out, it's a good excuse to dive in and build a mashup). The top prize is a new Xbox360 Elite, which is the current definition of the word sweet - black case, HDMI, and a 120 gig drive.

I'll be on hand, as will a number of team members from both the MS Live APIs, some of the other Microsoft teams, as well as from some non-MS folk.  I was talking with people from StrikeIron (http://www.strikeiron.com) and infragstics (http://www.infragistics.com), and weather bug (http://www.weatherbug.com), and they've got technical folks in town who'll be stopping by as well.  If you're in town and would like to get started, it all starts at 8 tonight and runs to 2am.

Just like I did for the Web20 conference earlier in the month, I've made a special landing page that's being used at the event, http://www.mashupguy.com/mix.  Right now the site has links to details on APIs, content, videos, etc.

Once we hit the 8 oclock hour, that page will change to include registration and gallery info.

The gallery will open next week, but in honor of the Web2Open event occuring in San Francisco, I've opened up a mashup registration page so you can make sure that your mashup is listed.

The gallery registration page can be found at

http://www.mashupguy.com/web20/GalleryRegister.aspx

If you're looking to build a mashup, you're going to need data. Sometimes this will be your own, other times you'll bring together data from one source and a visualization (such as Virtual Earth) from another.

For people that are looking to try doing mashups with data, one of the recommendations I have is to check out the SuperDataPack from StrikeIron. This is a set of data services that you can get access to for no charge (up to 10,000 hits/month), and there's some great data to use for your mashups.

Today, I posted a new sample in the resources section called 'Personal Government'. This takes a single piece of information - a 5 digit zip code  and then interacts with 5 different services to retrieve information provided by multiple different sources within a common area, government. The sources range from the federal government (senators), state government, county government, and city government. In addition, it also retrieves census data for zipcode as well.

Both a PDF of the lab, as well as a completed solution have been posted.

Ever been to a restaurant like TGI Fridays and see the sampler platter? Basically a dish with a little bit of everything included.  Not enough of anything for a meal, but you can try things out and see if you like them.  I recently had an opportunity to work with Koji Kato from Live on an API sampler. 

Instead of potato skins and  jalapeno poppers, this sampler has mini-applications for a number of the Live APIS.  This has applications on everything from Virtual Earth to a Messenger Activity project to a Live Contacts Project to.. to.. to.. Lots of stuff. It even includies some workflow foundation for API coordination and aggregation (that one's called Merged Search). Each one has a quick intro lab so you can try it out, expect to see some more in depth labs for some of the more complex applications (i.e. workflow).

The project's name is Live In A Box, and it's located over at CodePlex - http://www.codeplex.com/liveinabox. Check it out.

Awhile back, I wrote an entry in my other blog (http://www.marcmercuri.com) that talked about how easy it was to build a custom search engine using Live Search Macros. I've gone ahead and written this up as a proper step-by-step lab.

Search macros are cool and very easy to create (no coding required).

You can find these in the resources section on the http://www.mashupguy.com site.

Cheers,

Marc

You may have noticed that my Xbox Gamer Card showed up on the right hand side of the site this week.  I found

<iframe src="http://gamercard.xbox.com/REPLACE-THIS-WITH-YOUR-GAMERTAG.card" scrolling="no" frameBorder="0" height="140" width="204">Put your gamertag here too.</iframe>

If you've got a space in your gamer tag, you'll need to replace the space with %20.

So if you were Major Nelson, yours would look like:

<iframe src="http://gamercard.xbox.com/major%20nelson.card" scrolling="no" frameBorder="0" height="140" width="204">Put your gamertag here too.</iframe>

Official details are here:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/MyXbox/embedgamercard.htm

And if you're curious how it's possible that I've only got 20 points on my gamer card ... :-)

I actually have another account I've had forever (tallguy), but there was a bit of a mixup when trying to get the account changed over. Net-net, I ended up with two accounts, and can't transfer anything (points, rep, or score) from the original account to this one.  Sounds to me like a good excuse to play alot of  Gears of War when I get home this weekend.

I've just added another lab to the resources section. This one focuses on using Live Search with WCF in a windows forms application.

I've added a new lab that showcases how you can use Live QnA in both Windows Forms applications and ASP.NET applications.  Both the lab and the completed version of the lab can be found in the resources section of the site.

Enjoy!

The resources page is now live on http://www.mashupguy.com/resources.aspx

This is where you'll find code, labs, and other good stuff.  I've got a backlog of content available, so will start loading this up over the course of this week.

Welcome!

For the past 8 months or so, I've been building mashups with the APIs of a number of vendors, including Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, YouTube, AOL, StrikeIron, and others.

In the process, I've built some demos, established some best practices, and created content such as labs and demos.  Up until recently, these have been shared only within Microsoft (where I work) at events called 'Mashup Days'.  Mashup days are events where a bunch of people in the company get together, have some drinks, listen to some good music and collaborate and build some mashups.

At the MVP Summit in Redmond last month, we extended this event externally for the first time, and it was pretty well received.  With some involvement in the Web20 Conference in San Francisco next week, and the Mix07 conference at the end of the month, I thought the timing was right to start up a new blog, start sharing some content.

Only the blog is live right now, but as you can see from the menu bar, the site will have sample code, videos, and lots of information on the who, what, where, and how much $$ on APIs. All functionality will be enabled by early next week.

With that, welcome to the site - if there are certain APIs you'd like to get more details on, send me a note at mashupguy@hotmail.com.

Cheers,

Marc