Do you have a Microsoft account? Yes, the same consolidated account that powers your Outlook email/contacts/calendars, OneDrive, Xbox, Windows 8 and Windows Phone devices, along with a slew of other Microsoft services. Millions of people do. Chances are, your application’s users probably also have a Microsoft account. This presents a potential opportunity. Live Services is what powers many facets of your Microsoft account, like profile information, contacts, calendars and OneDrive. These services are very familiar for many users, and when you’re able to leverage these same services, users can feel right at home within your application. Enter Live Connect APIs, which are a thin layer of RESTful services on top of Live Services that allows developers to integrate Live Services into their applications. This is possible from any type of application – web, whether desktop or mobile, and across any platform. In this article, we’ll take a quick look at Live Connect APIs and then a deep-dive into using them for user authentication within a web application.

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