Announcements keep flowing at the PDC 2008. 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 what’s to come in the Silverlight space.
One of the major announcements was that of the Live Framework. Sync and Sharing for Applications.
Microsoft Describes this framework as:
The Live Framework is the uniform way for programming Live Services from a variety of platforms, programming languages, applications and devices. Consume and combine Live Services to build applications that span across digital devices and the web.
The true developer platform underlying the Live Mesh that enables file sync and sharing across devices was finally unveiled 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.
An interesting Live Framework diagram detail’s us of what’s behind the scenes.
I am hoping that the CTP(available here) is worth my time for development.
Leave your comments…
1 Trackback or Pingback for this entry:
[...] Microsoft PDC – Live Framework Announced and Released [...]