I am proud to announce that we have launched the MSN Developer Center on MSDN. This is culmination of some of the efforts I started driving shortly after writing the blog post MSN Developer Network? where I wrote

Yesterday, in a meeting to hash out some of the details of MSN Spaces API an interesting question came up. So far I've been focused on the technical details of the API (what methods should we have? what protocol should it use? etc) as well as the scheduling impact but completely overlooked a key aspect of building developer platform. I hadn't really started thinking about how we planned to support developers using our API. Will we have a website? A mailing list? Or a newsgroup? How will people file bugs? Do we expect them to navigate to http://spaces.msn.com and use the feedback form?

Besides supporting developers, we will need a site to spread awareness of the existence of the API.

After writing that post I started talking to various folks at MSN who were interested in providing APIs for their various services and realized that there was an opportunity for us to come up with a unified developer portal as opposed to a number of disjoint efforts. My argument was that instead of developers having to figure out they need to go to http://addins.msn.com/devguide.aspx to find out about extending MSN toolbar and http://www.viavirtualearth.com to find out about building MSN Virtual Earth mash-ups, we should just have http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn for all of MSN's Web 2.0 efforts. Everyone I talked to thought this made sense and now here we are.

Currently you can find information on extending or building applications with the APIs from Windows Desktop Search, MSN Toolbar, Start.com, MSN Virtual Earth, MSN Search, and MSN Messenger. In the near future I will be adding information about the APIs for interacting with MSN Spaces.

In addition to the developer center, we also have MSN Developer Forums where developers can discuss the various MSN APIs and interact with some of the people who work on the technologies.

Of course, this is just the beginning. Over the long term we have a bunch of stuff planned for the dev center including more APIs and more MSN properties joining the Web 2.0 party. This is going to be lots of fun.

PS: Shout outs go out to Jim Gordon, Chris Butler, Seth Demsey, Scott Swanson, Josh Ledgard and a host of others who helped make this a reality.