Live Mesh : Platform

Developers, meet the Live Framework blog

Live Mesh Team — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 01:21:00 GMT

We've been using this blog to share information about both Live Mesh the user experience, and what we formerly referred to as Live Mesh the developer platform. With the news at PDC about Live Services and the Live Framework, it's time to re-focus this blog on just the platform experience of Live Mesh. We'll continue to post news here about changes and updates to www.mesh.com and our client software for PC, Mac and Windows Mobile.

We've created a new team blog, http://blogs.msdn.com/liveframework, as a home for our developer oriented content. This is where we'll share more Behind Live Mesh content, tips and tricks for writing applications using the Live Framework, and other developer-centric news and information. Earlier today, for example, we announced a new build of the Live Framework Developer Sandbox and SDK are available to developers in the Live Framework CTP. We've also got a couple team members Tweeting away about Live Framework topics at http://twitter.com/liveframework .

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How does Live Mesh relate to Azure?

Live Mesh Team — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:21:00 GMT

In his PDC keynote just now, Ray Ozzie announced the Azure Services Platform. Here's the overview picture:

The Live Services box at left is home to the developer services and APIs that power the Live Mesh platform experience. Think of it this way: Live Mesh is a platform experience that is natively integrated with the Live Services component of the Azure Services Platform – it makes the core functionality of Live Services available to users.

Much more detail on Live Services for developers to come tomorrow!

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[Update: edited for clarity]

Live Services and Mesh at PDC

Live Mesh Team — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 01:00:20 GMT

PDC opens tomorrow, and while we previously pointed out some of the key Mesh-related Live Services content, we've changed our titles and released information on a few more sessions. So here's a refreshed list of ways to find us at PDC. Keep in mind that a recording of each session should be at the URLs below within 24 hours after the session completes. We'll also have some cool content coming on channel 9 and 10, we'll be posting links as that all comes online.

Monday: we don't have any Mesh-related sessions on Monday, because we're saving some fun announcements for David Treadwell's keynote Tuesday morning. You'll be able to find us for a chat in the Big Room, though -- look for the Live Services demo station just to your right as you walk in the main doors to the lounge/labs area, aka The Big Room (in the printed mini-guide, we're the area shaded dark red on the LACC Floor Plans page). 10 points and an invite to drinks with the Live Services team to anyone who can make us break and spill the beans before the keynote (and -100 points and booth cleanup duty to any team member who becomes a bean spiller ;)

Tuesday: after the keynote ends, the Mesh fun begins!

12:45pm BB41 Live Services: What I Learned Building My First Mesh Application (new since last time we posted)
1:45pm BB04 Live Services: A Lap around the Live Framework and Mesh Services
3:30pm BB20 Live Services: Making your Application More Social
5:15pm BB05 Live Services: Building Applications with the Live Framework.

Wednesday:

10:30am BB19 Live Services: Live Framework Programming Model Architecture and Insights
1:15pm BB51 Live Services: Programming Live Services Using Non-Microsoft Technologies (new)
3pm BB06 Live Services: Mesh Services Architecture and Concepts
4:45pm BB30 Live Services: Building Mesh-Enabled Web Applications Using the Live Framework. (new) Note that the printed mini-guide incorrectly lists BB34 as also being in this same time slot.
6pm Ask The Experts -- look for the Live Services tables

Thursday:

8:30am BB31 Live Services: FeedSync and Mesh Synchronization Services
10:15 BB35 Live Services: The Future of the Device Mesh
12pm BB34 Live Services: Notifications, Awareness, and Communications. Note that the printed mini-guide incorrectly lists this talk twice -- it will in fact only presented once, in this timeslot.

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Heads up: required update to Live Mesh coming next week

Live Mesh Team — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:59:52 GMT

With PDC just around the corner, we will be releasing the next update to Live Mesh, and it’s a major one. In fact, this is the most significant update to Live Mesh since we opened as a technology preview back in April. We know that many of you are going to be excited to see all the new features and fixes this release will bring (and there are a lot of them, many in response to your requests.) In the spirit of openness with you, our technology preview customers, we’d like to take a little time today to talk about what the update experience is going to be like—and why.

For all the previous updates to Live Mesh that we’ve released since the tech preview began in April, customers were notified (via a little pop up above the Live Mesh notifier) that updates were available. When you were ready to update the Live Mesh software on your device, you clicked on that notification and the process began. If you chose not to update right away, though, that was okay—Live Mesh continued to work uninterrupted. With this update, however, things are going to be a little different. Specifically, all Live Mesh users will have to update their Live Mesh software to continue using the product. This time, you won’t be able to wait to update Live Mesh—in order to keep using it, you’ll have to update the software, and until you do that synchronization and Live Remote Desktop will not be available. There is a fairly straightforward reason for this: we are upgrading our software and services to support an open beta, and to handle that scale we need to get all of our existing users onto these new systems quickly. For this particular release, we are forgoing backwards compatibility in favor of making the new set of features as broadly available as possible. Once you see how much Live Mesh has grown, we think you’ll agree that this was the right tradeoff!

We hope the advance warning reduces the amount of interruption this upgrade might cause. We will, of course, let you know before we begin to actually deploy the new update—we just wanted to make sure all our valued early adopters were “in the know” right from the start.

Stay tuned for lots of Live Mesh and Live Services news from PDC over the next week, and thank you to all of you for the great feedback you’ve provided over the last six months. Live Mesh wouldn’t be where it is today without all of you!

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The Live Platform at PDC

Live Mesh Team — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 01:27:44 GMT

We've had several posts here talking about Live Mesh as a platform, and we've said that we'll tell more of that story at our Professional Developer's Conference in October. The session list for PDC is now mostly complete, so you can start to get a sense of what we'll have to say about our platform:

Live Platform: New Developer Services and APIs
Live Platform: Building Mesh Applications
Live Platform: Mesh Services Architecture Deep Dive
Live Platform: Architecture and Advanced Programming Techniques
Live Platform: Building Applications with Social Data
Live Platform: FeedSync and Mesh Synchronization Services
Live Platform: Notifications, Awareness, and Communications
Live Platform: The Future of the Device Mesh

We're working on a couple more sessions as well that we hope to unveil once the conference starts. And our VP, David Treadwell, is confirmed as a keynote speaker.

They'll be a bunch of folks from the Live Platform team spending time in the community areas at PDC, and we're looking forward to your feedback and suggestions, and hearing what you plan to build on top of our platform.

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An Open Platform?

Live Mesh Team — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 02:41:30 GMT

Our mantra for designing the Live Mesh platform has been "comprehensive, simple, open." We've released two more Channel 9 videos this week to show what we mean.

As far as comprehensive goes, check out Ori Amiga's video showing off some sample apps and a peak at how the platform works under the covers. Clients and services, online and offline, files and applications...it's a pretty impressive set of demos to give some weight to our comprehensive claim.

When it comes to open and simple, you can see some of that in the demo where Ori browses through the resource model, starting around 11:40. You see a RESTful model, you see feeds, you see ATOM, JSON and other formats, and you see FeedSync. Which brings us to...another channel 9 video!

We got Steven Lees, one of the guys behind the FeedSync v1.0 spec, to sit down with the developer who built the Live Mesh client runtime that consumes/publishes FeedSync, plus the PM and dev who built the corresponding Live Mesh cloud storage service. Have a look here.

Using FeedSync as the basis for synchronization is a key to making the platform open and accessible. It was developed with community feedback, and is covered by Creative Commons ShareAlike and Microsoft Open Specification Promise. Which enables folks to work on projects like Mesh4x.

- Jeremy Mazner

Program Manager (and blog oversight guy), Live Mesh

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Live Mesh as a Platform

Live Mesh Team — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:55:00 GMT

I've been undercover for two years. After helping to get XNA off the ground, I took an opportunity to learn some new things from some very good people. The pain of working on version 1s fades after a few years, so I decided to try another one. The pain is again fresh in my mind. But that’s not what this post is about – it’s about the excitement of launching version 1.

This project requires deep domain experts on distributed systems, scale data centers, web, Windows, Mac, mobile, networking, app protocols, file systems, databases, synchronization, peer to peer, security and more. We not only had to find these people and convince them that it would be cool to pull heavy Gs on a version 1 “for a year”, we had to establish a common vocabulary and then all agree on some things. One of the very cool things about Live Mesh is that is has a broad scope, but is at the same time respectful of the specialization needed to succeed on the web, Windows, Mac and mobile. We couldn’t have achieved this without a team with deep but different experience, knowledge, practices, jargon and opinions – and that still managed to cooperate even when it got hard.

We introduced Live Mesh at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this evening. We are shipping working code to a community size that we think we can support while still working on the product. I look forward to the feedback.

We operate at such a scale at Microsoft that we have developed an instinct to specialize and focus. One of the typical early conversations in a new project is the target audience: consumers or enterprise? Large or small organizations? Web, Windows, Mac or mobile? What mobile targets? We rejected this early and focused us on adding value to individuals: people who may work in enterprises and belong to multiple organizations, but who also make choices as consumers, and use multiple technologies (and who are probably frustrated with the productivity barriers that exist as a side effect of the seams the industry imposes on them). We’ve thought a lot about adding value to enterprises too, primarily by empowering individuals while keeping in mind the confidentiality expected by organizations.

Our goal was to build a platform that spanned individuals, organizations and technologies. But we didn’t want to fall into the trap of assuming that we could get it right without using and proving it ourselves. And we also believed that the easiest way to express the fundamental potential of a platform is with an experience that delights and generates even more ideas.

To that end, we built both a platform and a set of basic horizontal experiences on multiple endpoints in parallel. As someone primarily concerned with the platform, the opportunity to “see it in action” as we build it has been very valuable and made the process more fun. I like them because they blend the web, Windows and other computing endpoints in a way that preserves the “it just works” feel of the web with seamless integration into my common workflows. The coolest thing about Live Mesh is how it smashes the abrupt mental switch that I have to make today as I move between being “on the web” and “in an application”.

This post is about the Live Mesh platform. We are not yet ready to release the Live Mesh platform, but I would like to share some of the core metaphors and building blocks we’ve been working on.

The focus for Live Mesh version 1 is to establish a Software + Services platform and ecosystem that enables unique new customer value, is unexpected by our competitors and will support broad innovation across multiple future releases. The core philosophy is to make it easy to manage information in a world where people have multiple computing experiences (i.e. PCs and applications, web sites, phones, video games, music and video devices) that they use in the context of different communities (i.e. myself, family, work, organizations).

My favorite example of a Software + Services application is Live Messenger (iTunes is another good example). The customer experience combines the best of local applications: always running, integrated with the shell and other applications, able to do background work and access local peripherals with the easy access to information that the web provides. Mesh is a Software + Services platform.

At the core of Mesh is concept of a customer’s mesh, or collection of devices, applications and data that an individual owns or regularly uses. The Mesh Account Service persists the relationship among these resources and authorizes access to them. The mesh is the foundation for a model where customers will ultimately license applications to their mesh, as opposed to an instantiation of Windows, Mac or a mobile account or a web site. Such applications will be seamlessly installed and run from their mesh and application settings persisted across their mesh. The device ring inside of the Live Desktop is a simple visualization of the mesh, and provides a view of all devices and current device availability. The Live Mesh platform provides the ability for applications to connect to any other device, regardless of network topology (network transparency), within the mesh. This infrastructure enables the Live Mesh Remote Desktop experience today.

A key design goal of the Live Mesh data synchronization platform is to allow customers to retain the ownership of their data that is implicit with local storage while improving on the anywhere access appeal of the web. The evolution of the web as a combined experience and storage platform is increasingly forcing customers to choose between the advantages of local storage (privacy, price, performance and applications) and the browser’s implicit promise of data durability, anywhere access and in many cases, easy sharing. A side effect of the competition to store customer data in the cloud and display it in a web browser is the fragmentation of that data and subsequent loss of ownership. Individual sites like Spaces, Flickr and Facebook make sharing easy, provided the people you are sharing with also use the same site. It is in fact very difficult to share across sites and equally difficult to work on the same data across the PC, mobile and web tiers.

The fundamental unit of synchronization in Live Mesh is a mesh object. Access to mesh objects is via the common web metaphor of a feed. These building blocks provide low barriers to adoption in addition to enabling appropriate customer experience metaphors in different technology, organization and business domains. As an example, one instantiation of a mesh object is as a local (shared, aka Live) folder on a PC. This same mesh object might be instantiated as a slideshow on a web site, and as preview and upload UX on a mobile device with a built-in camera. A Live Folder is but one specialization of a mesh object. A mesh object could also represent a range of cells in Excel or a To Do list that can be accessed from anywhere. You’ll see more on this in an upcoming Channel 9 interview with our storage and synch team.

Live Mesh has been designed with the goal of enabling explicit control over the location and custody of data even in a sharing environment. Mesh objects (i.e. files, lists, etc. and associated information) are physically stored in a Live Mesh Storage Server and exposed as authenticated feeds. The Live Mesh cloud implementation of a storage server is intended to be a peer to large number of Mesh Enterprise Storage Servers that can be offered in subsequent releases. This storage and feed architecture supports a completely enterprise scoped sharing across all tiers: PC, intranet browser, and mobile in addition to home - home and home - work scenarios.

Live Mesh provides the building blocks to support the notion of groups, or communities (member lists) of people associated with a mesh object. These lists are managed via the simple email-web confirmation exchange that is popular on the web. Member lists provide both a simple permission model and a natural scoping for the collaboration features of Mesh. The basic group mechanism can be trivially extended to add entities such as organizations to participate (in an assigned “role”). Similarly, you might invite a SpellChecker bot into a group.

Every layer of the mesh is built on top of APIs in the form of feeds. These layers enable:

The ability to add / remove devices (and someday applications) to a mesh and manage groups (by initiating invitations).

The ability to open a mutually authenticated raw communications channel, to any device in a group, regardless of current location or network topology. This channel always works, by way of cloud relay if necessary, but will automatically and transparently take the cheapest and fastest possible network path.

The ability to subscribe (“tell me when it has changed”) to resources and publish (“I changed it”) notifications against resources. The pub/sub infrastructure eliminates polling the cloud to become aware of changes. The sync engine itself uses pub/sub for sync change triggering.

An extensible “awareness” infrastructure which is scoped to the group and the information being shared. The first Live Mesh experiences provide a very simple notion of awareness – who is “using” a Live Folder now, but the infrastructure is designed to support much richer notions. The programmer sees a “durable for a login session” extensible XML document (unique per mesh object/group) that can be queried/updated at a very high rate and scale. Like everything in Live Mesh that needs to be queried, the programmer uses the pub/sub engine to signal interest in changes, and waits for notification of such changes.

A durable news event stream. Unlike awareness, which is level triggered against a schema, news is message based. The goal of news and awareness are to create a very real time intimacy around the collaboration experience.

A FeedSync based sync infrastructure that enables any device that is capable of web protocols to participate in bidirectional sync, again in the context of (fully authenticated) groups. One of the “devices” that can participate in this experience is a 3rd party web site. While the version 1 experience is primarily around syncing folders of files, FeedSync and the Live Mesh infrastructure is far more flexible. It could sync lists, tables, photo galleries, playlists, calendars, etc.

A scale blob store that can be referenced (as an enclosure) in the sync feed.

Because this is all built on feeds, all of this functionality is accessible from every endpoint that can run a browser (i.e. darn near everything). The Live Desktop, Windows Live Folders, Mac and mobile experiences are the first examples of the potential of this platform.

It’s just the beginning.

Mike Zintel

Product Unit Manager, Mesh and Storage Platform

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