First Look at Live Mesh and Live Framework

• By Kathleen Richards
• 11/03/08

David Treadwell, Microsoft's corporate vice president of the Live Services Platform, announced the new Live Framework during a keynote address at last week's Professional Developers Conference that addressed Windows 7 and other tools and technologies that will make up the front-end infrastructure of the company's unfolding Software plus Services strategy.

The Live Framework is described as a "uniform" way for developers to program against Live Services, which are integrated with Microsoft's Live Mesh platform. The new framework, released as a community technology preview (CTP) last Monday, is designed to support multiple programming languages, devices, and platforms.

Announced in April, Live Mesh is downloadable PC software that extends Windows to the Web to enable synchronization and sharing of data, apps, people and devices. Microsoft is releasing the first open beta of Live Mesh this week. It will offer limited availability to Mac and Windows Mobile 6 clients, according to the company.

"The Live Mesh application is built completely on top of Live Framework," said Ori Amiga, group program manager of the Live Developer Platform at Microsoft.

The Live Framework is composed of the Live operating environment -- similar to the .NET CLR -- and a programming architecture that includes a resource model and managed libraries, specifically, the Silverlight Kit, the .NET Kit and the AtomPub .NET Library. The CTP is supported on Windows XP, Vista, Internet Explorer 7, IE 8 and Firefox.

Live Services, which are designed to handle user data and app resources (Live ID, Live Messenger, etc.), are part of the newly announced Azure Services Platform for Microsoft's Web tier. The Azure Services Platform sits on top of Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud operating system, which was unveiled at PDC on Monday.

Developers can sign up for Live Mesh provisioning here, and go here for the Live Framework CTP, which requires Visual Studio 2008, .NET 3.5, and Silverlight 2.