Windows Live Service at the moment has some problems

At the moment the windows live service, which is provided by MS and used by my app Week View, has some major problems.

Update:

The problem is also discussed in this thread: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/835b3f26-caee-4288-a88e-2cdd211f0c97/getasync-for-the-live-calendar-api-takes-really-long-time

Recently I got emails from users that they cannot edit and delete appointments in Week View. The current maretkpace version of Week View was updated 2 months ago but the problem occurs since a few days. So I was quite sure that this is not a problem of the app but the windows live service. (At the moment I am working on the next update of Week View, in fact it’s nearly finished)

So I started the debugger to go through the windows live requests step by step…

Usually a call to the windows live service to get appointment details takes a few seconds and is only required on the first login to windows live. On the next starts of Week View this method is called in the backgroud. So Week View automatically gets the latest data from windows live.

But at the moment a call to a method „Live Service – give me the calendar data“ takes about 30 seconds and after this quits with an error.

I started a thread about this problem in a developer forum and hope to get a reply from MS soon: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/wpapps/en-US/06809388-8fe4-4c88-910a-5d1ac37a4421/liveconnectclientgetasyncmecalendars-throws-liveconnectexception?forum=messengerconnect

I tested this with other apps that use the windows live service to edit/delete appointments and they have the same problem at the moment – this is what I expected since the problem is related to the windows live service and not to an app.

Conclusion: I am aware of the problem but since the resolution depends on an external service I cannot fix it myself. Week View of course can still be used but editing/deleting appointments inside the app is not possible without the windows live service.

Background Information

Why does Week View require the windows live service?

In fact it does not. Signing in to windows live inside the app is optinal but since the programing interface provided by MS has many limitations, for editing/deleting appointments and getting calendar categories it is required to sign in to windows live inside the app.

This way Week View can load appointment IDs from your windows live calendar and calendar categories and provide edit/delete methods. This is nothing special – it does the same thing a user does, when he/she signs in to his windows live calendar in a web browser.