I recently had the opportunity to demo our Contoso Riders Quick App at EnergizeIT in Toronto. A big thanks to Jean-Luc David and Chris Dufour for being such great hosts and for making our Services track a great success!

So you might be asking yourself; “What’s a Quick App?”

Quick Apps are projects that showcase the Microsoft Live Platform service offerings and also serve as templates which developers can use as a springboard to base their own projects off of. They are open-source projects release under Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).

In the case of Contoso Riders, we implemented services and APIs such as:

• Live ID for user authentication
• Live Messenger Presence API and IM Control for Instant Messenging
• Virtual Earth Map Control to display and Virtual Earth Collections for storing map and routing information
• Silverlight Streaming for hosting videos
• Live Spaces Weblogs and the Metaweblog API to store and manage content
• Live Spaces Photo Albums to store photos

You can download the source for Contoso Riders on CodePlex as part of the Windows Live Quick Apps project.