Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Have any of you ever used the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant?

• Intro:  http://winliveid.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!AEE1BB0D86E23AAC!222.entry
• Q&A:  http://winliveid.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!AEE1BB0D86E23AAC!324.entry

Man, this thing couldn’t be any cooler for me. I noticed its availability during the recent update of Windows Live Messenger. (which by the way is available online as build 8.0.0812) Apparently, Windows Live Messenger is the only way to get it so far which is a shame.

What is it? It’s a piece of software that resides on your desktop and acts as an agent for authentication. Basically what it does is it allows you to cache the credentials & passwords of your Windows Live Accounts securely on your machine. Whenever you need to login to a site or whenever you need to switch logins to another account, it presents you with a clean user interface with the list of accounts that you’ve cached on your machine along with the photo/picture associated with the account and you simply click on one of the accounts to login.

Not a big deal you say?   Account credential caching has been in Windows for ages?  (Some nasty Mac users might scream " KEYCHAIN HAS HAD THIS ON THE MAC SINCE BLAH BLAH BLAH") Well, what I think is cool about this isn’t the fact that it’s anything new or that it’s flexible. It’s all be done before. What’s cool is that it’s constrained and specific to Windows Live credentials only which are special being that they’re credentials that can be used for both application software like Windows Live Writer & web-based services. It doesn’t cache anything else… it doesn’t cache the username and password for any other service and it’s integrated into all the Windows Live services that I use.

And since I use multiple accounts for multiple email addresses and multiple Windows Live services, this is a total dream for me… being able to quickly switch between the different blogs I own, for instance, is really nice.