Web UX
Chris Koenig, a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft, visited my local .NET User Group (DNUG) on Monday night and presented on one of Microsoft's latest developments, Live Mesh.
Chris gave us a basic run-down of what Mesh is: how it synchronizes information across various devices and can share information between different users' mesh accounts and the benefits of storing information in the cloud. He also emphasized that this is not only for Microsoft products but is built so that it can work with smart phones, various Apple products, video cameras, GPS devices, and a bunch of other stuff.
Mesh is a Live Service and uses Windows Live ID for authentication. You can get started for free and have 5 Gigs of storage. If you go over your 5 Gigs in your mesh then your data is still available, it is just hosted more like peer-to-peer rather than being available in the cloud. There are still some fuzzy details on how that works but we'll have to do a little research and keep checking back with Chris as Mesh is continued to be developed.
Chris also took us through writing a demo application of reading information off of a mesh and manipulating it all through code. The synchronization, data source connectivity, and general interface to work with the mesh cloud is dead easy. Not only that, but the possibilities of what you can develop for this are practically endless. You can setup services to read queues of data being added to the mesh and respond to those events, pull in data from your mesh into your various applications, etc.
As an example, Chris talked about a sample application that ran on a mobile phone to pull in a TV guide and then wrote to a mesh when you chose to record something, and then the desktop client at the your house would have a service listening to the feed and would integrate with the Windows Media Center DVR to setup the show to be recorded. Mesh could just as easily be used for business applications as well.
Check out Chris' blog for more information and don't forget to subscribe to his feed!
You can also access the Developer version of Mesh to try it out for yourself.
