Writing Your First .Net App for Lync 2010 in 5 Easy Steps and 10 Short Minutes

Wanting to do your first Microsoft Lync 2010 integration? It will take no more than 10 minutes to make your first Lync "Hello World" integration!

Note: For this tutorial we are assuming that you have Lync 2010 running on this developement machine and working. Also that Visual Studio 2010 is on your machine.

#1-Download and install the free Lync 2010 SDK.

#2-Open Visual Studio and create a "New Project".
(or download the free Visual Basic 2010 Express and install if you don't have it.)

#3 - Select a "WFP Application" template for this project as shown below. (the Lync controls won't work on Windows Form Application.)

#5 -The Lync SDK controls you just installed above will be in the "Toolbox" and you can just drag them on your new project form! Go ahead, drag the "MyPresenceChooser" control onto your app. Now let's test our app by clicking "Run".

#5 - Note how you can change Lync 2010 presence from your new application. Wow! We wrote a Lync 2010 app!

Now you can go on and do all those cool things with code that are rolling around in your mind!
Note that this integration is at the Lync 2010 client level and that it is also possible to integrate at the Lync Server level. Once I can help integrating at that level in 10 minutes I'll do another post! ;-)