You know that feeling you get when you wake up, and you’re SOO hungry? You go into the kitchen, scramble some eggs, maybe throw in some peppers and onions and cheese and mushrooms and sausage. You fry up some bacon, heat up some hash browns, put some jelly on toast and cream cheese on bagel and gravy on biscuit. When everything is hot and ready, you sit down at the table, pick up a fork (or two) and dig in…

…but wait! Something is missing!  THE SALT! You forgot to add a dash of salt! It may seem little, but it makes a huge difference.

***

As of yesterday, a new version of Messenger 8.0 is now ready for your downloading pleasure – version 8.0.0812. Think of this release just like that little dash of salt on your big delicious breakfast.  Almost nothing has changed to the perceptible eye – but enough to make a difference. Specifically:

–          Many people will notice serious improvements to the quality of audio and video

–          Fewer messenger crashes, hangs,  and connectivity issues.

***

The Tale of one (now fixed) Bug In Messenger

Over the past few months  “error 80004005 – Can’t Log In” had become our #1 customer support issue.  A few dedicated customers (some of whom posted their findings to this blog!) discovered a correlation: 

“Before I  got this error, I had just changed my friendly name to something REALLY long w/ emoticons.”

That was the key! In messenger, we have a max-length for friendly names. When you sign-in, we check to make sure your friendly name is under this max. But we were calculating the length in two different ways:   

Say limit is 6 characters per friendly name. Messenger would let me type  “LeahJ” no problem, because it was counting the whole emoticon as one character, and thus my friendly name was 5 characters total. But the next time I tried to sign-in, Messenger would do a check which would count each character of the emoticon separately and thus “Leah:-)”  added up to 7 characters, which is over the max limit of 6.  Error.

Thanks to the customers who stuck with us to help identify the problem. We couldn’t have done it without you! Now everyone – go get the latest version – it’s good for you!

 

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If you have a comment/question/concern/discussion topic/rant/rave/other – please head over to the Windows Live Messenger Newsgroup.

News

August 10, 2006

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