The PDC announcements keep flowing. Today's keynote was full of them - with the first Windows 7 preview, Live Services announcements and Live Mesh updates, a peek at Office 14 and even hints at whats to come in the Silverlight space. The one I want to share some thoughts on is the Live Framework one.
The true developer platform underlying the Live Mesh that enables file sync and sharing across devices was finally unweiled in full form and there were a couple of demos on how both client apps (a WPF photo app) and Web apps (such as the BBC iPlayer) can use sync and data sharing to offer users new functionality including offline experiences. I personally think sync (not just between the client and the server, but in a peer-to-peer fashion across devices) is the interesting space for next-generation Web applications to differentiate on, especially as raw offline storage and eventually offline execution itself get commoditized by client runtimes and browsers alike. It is great to see the Live Framework enabling these capabilities while taking care of the underlying plumbing and operations. I alluded to these forthcoming APIs in my post on Live Mesh when it was first introduced. Now they’re here...
There is an interesting Live Framework diagram detailing various aspects of what happens behind the scenes.
Oh, and I can't wait to get the new version of Live Mesh as well, with Mac support later this week. I've gotten into the habit of using it to share files as well as remote into all my machines.
Posted on Tuesday, 10/28/2008 @ 10:02 PM