We did a test code drop of The Hive on Friday, the same day we finally got a comleted spec document :) This week we are finishing off the administrative section of the site, performance testing, and debugging. We have to have another code drop on Friday, and the final code complete drop on 8/15/03. We have two primary challenges at this point:
1. We cannot get Passport to work on our dev machines (WinXP Pro) to implement and test the Passport Authentication. We have tried everything we can think of, but it seems MSFT did not design Passport to run on an XP dev machine.
2. We have to integrate a storage system that MSFT built. We will be interacting with it using Web Services, which is no big deal. We are still not entirely convinced this storage system is the correct choice, but it is what will be used, so we have to do our best with it.
On a related note, a read-only (i.e. no user uploads) version of The Hive can be found at: http://www.msnmessenger-download.com/themes. THis “Mini Hive” is intended for the promotions people to make “themed” image sets for MSN Messenger 6.0.