The TechEd Online team have posted Amit’s keynote from TechEd Australia;
He gives an overview of software+services, doesn’t talk a ton about Live Mesh but gives a good vibe on why we are doing this.
View the Tech·Ed Australia opening keynote, delivered by Amit Mital, General Manager Live Mesh & Developer platform. Hear from Amit on how Software-plus-Services, Microsoft’s strategy for the next generation of computing, are being used to
Check it out from about 6m 50secs in stream ASX
The Messenger team rolled out 2.5 of the Windows Live Messenger Library – build your own web based Messenger client, you own the UX !!!
There is a sample I’ve been keeping in my back pocket (waiting for security review) but now seems like a good time to point to it -- we should be releasing the source code on as part of the Quick Apps within a few weeks.
We worked with our buddies at Terralever to build a docked Messenger Library implementation using Silverlight – check it out at http://terralever.com/sandbox
Mess.be were first on the news (btw – love the don’t mess with Logan) – I got this for hitting 100 members in my fan club.
Check out the What’s new
Browser Support Firefox® 3.0 is now an officially supported browser. Contact Presence The new Contact.Presence property returns presence information for contacts. Previously, presence information was only available via IMAddress.Presence. The new property should simplify application development because most applications can rely on Contact.Presence. Contact Display Names The new Contact.DisplayName property returns the name that applications should use when rendering a contact. This property is dynamically computed based on various values including the contact's current display name as well as the user's nickname for the contact. Contact Nicknames Windows Live Messenger enables users to provide nicknames for their contacts. Applications can now read and write nicknames using the Contact.Nickname property. Endpoint Names The user's Endpoints now expose their human-friendly names via the Name property. Applications can also customize the name of the local endpoint. Showing and Hiding Sign-in Control Improvements have been made to the reliability of the Sign-in Control. The control can be displayed and hidden using the new Show and Hide methods. Item Accessors All collection types now expose an item accessor to retrieve items from the collection. Applications no longer need to enumerate through a collection to retrieve specific items.
Browser Support Firefox® 3.0 is now an officially supported browser.
Contact Presence The new Contact.Presence property returns presence information for contacts. Previously, presence information was only available via IMAddress.Presence. The new property should simplify application development because most applications can rely on Contact.Presence.
Contact Display Names The new Contact.DisplayName property returns the name that applications should use when rendering a contact. This property is dynamically computed based on various values including the contact's current display name as well as the user's nickname for the contact.
Contact Nicknames Windows Live Messenger enables users to provide nicknames for their contacts. Applications can now read and write nicknames using the Contact.Nickname property.
Endpoint Names The user's Endpoints now expose their human-friendly names via the Name property. Applications can also customize the name of the local endpoint.
Showing and Hiding Sign-in Control Improvements have been made to the reliability of the Sign-in Control. The control can be displayed and hidden using the new Show and Hide methods.
Item Accessors All collection types now expose an item accessor to retrieve items from the collection. Applications no longer need to enumerate through a collection to retrieve specific items.
The teams just shipped some beta bits for Mail/Messenger/Photo Gallery/Movie Maker/Writer/Toolbar/Family Safety and Outlook Connector – whoa! (check out liveside’s photo gallery post)
Lots of stuff.
My favorite bit though, is a programmability scenario enabled in the new Photo Gallery client;
essentially you can use the power of photo gallery for tagging, fixing, stitching, pumping into photosynth, people tagging etc. and then publish that photo along w/ metadata TO YOUR OWN APP!
check out the post here.
Scott wrote a very well disclaimed article on Live Mesh and CoreCRL (the cut down version of .NET which powers things like Silverlight) – check it out if you are interested on the inner workings of Mesh and .NET – I will inherit his disclaimer and try to get a full post on the Live Mesh Blog:
from Scott: “Everything in this post is pure conjecture by me, done by simply poking around my system and talking to myself. I don't work for the Live Mesh team, nor do I know anyone on the team. Anyone could have written this.”
I had a cool chat w/ Long at teched au – cool guy – check out his write up on Applications coming soon to a mesh near you;
the liveside guys wrote a bit too; and I think i’ll get a please explain from Kip when I get back to Seattle.
The MSDN Flash (signup) team in Australia let me write the editorial this month, below is what got sent:
Angus Logan here! Finula has asked me to be Guest Editor of this MSDN Flash to share my insights on Live Mesh. I look after technical product management for the Live Platform in Redmond. It’s great to be back in Australia, hanging out and working Tech.Ed! Because Amit Mital did the Tech.Ed Keynote earlier today on software +services, I wanted to share some details on Live Mesh from a dev’s perspective.
What is it? Company line: A software+services platform, an open platform and a platform experience.
Angus’ view: You may use lots of devices every day: mobile phone, home/work PC(s) or Mac(s), digital photo frame, Qantas Club internet kiosk, Foxtel iQ, or Nabaztag. You like using these devices, but accessing the programs and files you want on each device is hard (watch Ray’s introduction). The first application (the tip of the iceberg) built on the Live Mesh platform is available at www.mesh.com. It provides a way for you to add devices to your mesh and connect to them remotely; you can easily share files and folders across devices or with friends and stay up to date with the latest news/activities from across your mesh. For more info watch the video tour and sign up for the tech preview to help us scale the platform! I’m a dev – what’s in it for me? There is a ton of plumbing (video tour)! You could build it yourself (we did) but you don’t need to. Focus on your app, not the underlying infrastructure. Our mantra: Comprehensive, Simple, Open We haven’t released an SDK for Live Mesh yet (join waitlist) but here is a heads-up on the core components of Live Mesh: the Mesh Operating Environment, the resource model, and an app delivery/deployment. The Mesh Operating Environment (MOE) runs on the local computer (PC, future Windows Mobile and Mac and other device types). And it also runs in Microsoft’s datacenters. You can code against it with the same syntax for cloud or client, online or offline, fast or lightning-fast. Under the hood, MOE sync’s the data between devices (p2p) and people using FeedSync. The resource model consists of enclosures inside data entries wrapped up in a feed which may live in a feed of feeds – you will be able to program the mesh using .NET object model, or RESTful API and ATOM(PUB), RSS, JSON or POX. You can do things like serialize .NET objects into data entries and then LINQ across them, when updated they’ll be sync’d to all necessary devices (and people). A Mesh Application is a special app, it can be accessed online (via the Live Desktop) and offline access (via machine w/ the MOE installed). The code (Silverlight or JavaScript) and the application data is stored and deployed in the Mesh to each device. For more information check out the Live Mesh Blog and forum, and don’t forget to sign up to the Live Mesh technical preview today!
During Amit Mital’s TechEd Australia keynote, Dr Neil went a bit rogue and showed the Live Mesh mobile bits – they aren’t available yet but somehow he got a copy on his cell and decided to show sync’ing a simple file (a photo) from his Treo over to his PC… it was all real on stage – way cool.
check out Long’s post on the topic (great picture too)