If you’ve taken a peek at Microsoft Live Mesh would you leave a comment here and tell me what the big deal is? And what the hell is Steve Gilmor talking about? Seriously, read that article if you can get through it. I get the feeling that top bloggers like Gilmore and Scoble use all this social networking buzz like a proverbial hacky sack devised to simply keep a conversation afloat. Scoble even goes so far as say

Microsoft’s fans are delivered to the promised land.
  - Robert Scoble (link)

Where exactly is this promised land? Seriously, that’s out of touch given Mesh’s beta status, numerous missing features and a nebulous definition. Heck, I’m an MS fan and I just don’t get it. I’ve yet to come across a clear description of what Mesh really is or will be? My initial experience completely sucked. The other night I sat down for dinner with Barry Kelly and Adam Markowitz (Adam, you’ve been linked to so get that blog up!) and neither had a good understanding of Mesh and these are bright guys!

I’m actually glad or perhaps even relieved it confounds Joel as well. For now, I’ll take that as a good sign.

Anyway, .NET started out pretty nebulous and poorly defined but the end result has proven extremely satisfying so there is hope. I wonder if Microsoft felt compelled to release something in these days of exploding social networks simply to remain relevant and in the conversation which, in this case, somehow seems to have worked. IMO it seems Mesh was released so customers could try to help Microsoft to figure out exactly what to do with this technology as a number of pieces seems like a rehash of existing services.

Now, had Microsoft announced a Windows based, Amazon-like, elastic compute cloud that would have been really interesting.

So this is a new twist...

I decided to take a peek at Microsoft’s new Windows Live Mesh and upon attempting to install the client for Devices got this error message:

 
Now, I don’t know about you but I’d be hard pressed to think of someone I know running Vista who hasn’t disabled UAC. Anyway, I switch my account to Power User and install the client which gives me this message hovering over my tray:

Pressing forward I click on the Mesh icon in my tray and see this:

Now, I recognize the little colorful shield next to Configure Live Mesh Report Desktop means it requires elevated privileges. I click the link and get the above error window again. So, I exit live Mesh, click on the Start menu, type "mesh" then right click to "Run as Administrator":

I return to the above Live Mesh window and click the "Configure Live Mesh Remote Desktop" link and:

So much for living on the edge now, back to work!

Anyone else have better luck?

o, Google releases Google App Engine a cloud computing service for building web applications in Python. Very cool! Over the coming days and weeks I’m sure there will be plenty of comparisons with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud for us to consume. Cloud computing is an interesting model, one where I believe an independent dev tools company could flourish.

In fact, before leaving CodeGear I sat down with Jim Douglas to discuss ideas around web development focusing on the growing eco-system of web services that companies are publishing on what now seems like a daily basis. The discussion covered a variety of web services available as well as platforms like Facebook, all things I’ve been thinking about for a long time. To the right is a photo of a page from my developer’s journal which outlines a concept I had (in March 2006) for extending Delphi applications, including the IDE, using web services. For those of you familiar with Delphi’s ToolsAPI it’s like extending the IDE, or any Delphi application, without installing/updating binaries on the local machine. The net effect is it affords the small company the opportunity to deliver more features faster with less impact to their installed base as opposed to getting stuck on a designer. With the advent of so many different API’s from so many different companies I think there’s a good opportunity for a company to stitch these services together and provide developers an entire toolset for use within their applications.

Over the past few years we’ve really witnessed the web grow into an honest to goodness platform and I think Facebook’s salvo really helped lead the way. Initially, we’ve seen the explosion in the world of social networking which I believe is largely due to the allure of ad revenue from millions of page views fueled by viral growth.

Eventually, with things like the Elastic Compute Cloud and Google Apps Engine I believe we’ll see more mainstream web application development move "into the cloud". Today, to leverage Amazon’s services it’s like working with Legos where you need piece things together to build out a site. One example I think illustrates the difference between Amazon and Google is Amazon’s Copy Proposal for S3 read it and let it sink in. I think that illustrates a fundamental difference between how these services are likely to evolve. On the other hand Google’s App Engine appears to be a more well rounded service which will make it interesting to watch Amazon’s response.

One thing is for sure, we won’t likely see Amazon or Google or Microsoft or IBM develop tools that would allow developers to leverage services from many different companies which is where I believe there is an opening for something creative to occur. I guess time will tell who will jump at that opportunity as it’s not likely to come from one of the big name players. I think this idea is already happing in the social network arena where sites like Plaxo and FriendFeed are aggregating data from a number of different services.

Another cool thing about moving "into the cloud" is the opportunity to use whatever OS you want on your local machine. I’m using a MacBook Pro and I’d love the opportunity to boot to the other half of my hard drive and work in OSX for awhile.

Btw, just landed in my inbox:

Thanks for signing up to try Google App Engine!  Your account has been activated, so you can begin building applications!

Looks like it could be a long night!

What’s your take on cloud computing?

I’m a fan of TEDTalks and this is one, about BumpTop desktop, is one I enjoyed.

There are a bunch of talks I’ve watched and I’m interested to know which ones you might have enjoyed. I’m looking for the best way to share these as I’m not sure an individual post about each one really makes sense.

In any case, I think the concepts presented are interesting though I’m not sure there all that practical on a desktop PC. As for practicality I think the iPhone/iPod Touch UI has some similar concepts which are very practical.

What are your favorites?

Having started work at Falafel I’m obviously working with a new, as in new to me, group of developers where previously I’d been working with many of the same guys (no women in Delphi R&D) for the past 7-8 years. As with meeting any new group of software developers you’re bound to learn about tools, utilities and technologies you either haven’t heard of, never had the chance to try out or had no specific use for at the time.

One of those is Notepad++ which I finally decided to install it after seeing Lino fire it up and tweak a web.config file with syntax highlighting and more. I’ve also started using Microsoft’s LogParser 2.2 which I remembered reading about long ago but never really had much use for until recently when got into ASP.NET development on a large deployed application developed by Falafel. I now wish I’d looked at it more closely a long time ago as it’s an incredibly powerful tool.

Some other tools I’ve been using recently are NUnit and FxCop which I’d read a lot about but since I didn’t work much on managed code while at CodeGear I never had the opportunity to use in production until now. Lastly, there are the portable versions of some of my most often used apps which I think are great and I’m using everyday.

Anyway, as you can probably tell I’m kind of like a kid in a candy store right now and really enjoying the chance to work with a whole bunch of cool "new" tools, and people.