Finally. Finally. That’s really all I have to say about it. If there is one thing missing from Windows Live, it’s that Microsoft basically ignored their primary and most strategic audience – developers. Well, until now that is:
Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie on Sunday said the company is creating Internet-delivered services for corporate customers to complement its on-premise software.
Ozzie, speaking at Microsoft’s TechEd 2006 conference for business technology users, described some of the online services Microsoft intends to offer to businesses, including single sign-on and network management.
As a result, we now have Windows Live Dev. I’m going to dive into it a little further this week, and hopefully they say something about it tomorrow at realDEVELOPMENT_06. Sadly, the SDK I most want to use is not yet available (Windows Live ID).
Read: CNET News.com
MasterMaq's Blog 
More stub info at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnlive/html/WinLiveIDServ.asp?frame=true
One of the best things about this is the potential support in Desktop apps and not just web sites.
Live ID is the evolution of Passport and it’s possible that MS is hoping to shed some of the trust issues around Passport with this branding change. The fees for Passport integration were too big for most Micro ISVs. I wonder if there will be fees for integration with Live ID? I imagine these fees were really the biggest barrier to broader adoption of Passport. Live ID doesn’t include ‘InfoCard’ (just renamed as CardSpace in terms of the SDK) yet but apparently it will, which provies more of a shared ecosystem opportunity.
Actually, not so sure on the including Windows CardSpace. From what I heard yesterday at realDEVELOPMENT_06, it seems as though CardSpace and Live ID are very much separate products which solve different problems. The two products can work together, but CardSpace needs a lot of work first.