LiveSide - News blog : Mix 08

Ready for Live Mesh? LiveSide to bring you “Live Mesh news”

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:56:00 GMT

Next week, at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, Microsoft is expected to unveil Live Mesh, a new product that will bring the first of Ray Ozzie’s services vision to light. Live Mesh combines a program installation on computers with a “web desktop”, or cloud based storage, and will allow computers on the “mesh” to synchronize folders among computers and to the cloud, share folders with others, and access computers on the mesh remotely from another computer or by accessing the “web desktop” via the internet.

We’ve been telling you about Live Mesh for quite some time, and as early as last December we told you to “pay attention to feedsync”. Then at Mix08 (and yeah I know the Mix badge is still on LiveSide, but have you checked out all the videos?), we deciphered Ray Ozzie’s cryptic messages for you, although the naming looks like it’s changed a bit, and Live Mesh now refers to the product that will control the “mesh” of devices to sync and share, something that was referred to as Horizon. Or something like that. Anyway, it’s Live Mesh for now.

While we’ve got a general idea of how this is all going to work – file synch via RSS shared extensions (which Microsoft is calling Feedsync, and which it placed under the open specifications promise), plus a lot more, we’re sure, we can’t wait to get a real look at what Live Mesh can do.

So we’re going to be bringing you the announcements as they hit the wire next week, and head on down to San Francisco on Thursday to get our hands on, see some demos, and talk to some of our soon to be Live Mesh friends.

We’ll have a lot more next week, but you can study up in the meantime:

LiveSide stories tagged

Virtual Earth at Mix08 with Silverlight and Seadragon

Chris — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 03:41:00 GMT

One of the best things about Mix08 is that all the sessions are online, meaning if you don't go you can still educate yourself. The one I've just watched was given by Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth Tech Evangelist, who demoed how developers can work with VE (via John). Chris actually starts with a great slide clarifying the difference between VE and Live Maps, with VE being the Ajax API and Live Maps the consumer offering built on this. Its nice to see the branding issues being tackled for a change.

While I'm not a developer, Chris gives such a good presentation that I'd encourage you all to watch it. Here's a few things I thought were worth sharing:

Microsoft is storing 15 PetaBytes of data that is used with VE. Nothing to say for this except wow.
The next VE release is April (I love it when they talk dirty)
Virtual Earth + Silverlight - Chris demos a new Silverlight VE Control, adding media to the Virtual Earth experience. Jump to 52 minutes in and watch for the next 5 minutes to see how impessive this is.
Virtual Earth + Silverlight + Seadragon - Chris shows that by adding DeepZoom functionality to VE, any image media you add can then scale with the map. Scenarios I came up with were:
- letting users add their PhotoZoom collages onto the own VE collections in order to share holiday snaps.
- estate agents adding photos and videos of houses for sale
but theres a whole bunch more (suggestions?)
There's an MS VE Silerlight 2.0 Beta SDK coming soon

And here's the bonus link:

Virtual Earth + Silverlight 2.0 game demo :)

Microsoft churning out the Ozzie + Mesh PR, so nobody talks about Horizon

Chris — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:38:59 GMT

In case you haven't been following the Microsoft PR Mix08 tour bus, here's the numerous stops they've been making on the subject of Ray Ozzie and Mesh:

The FT churns out a great piece, which you could be forgiven for thinking that Ray Ozzie wrote himself judging by the style and vagueness. Of course he didn't because they actually showed something palpable towards the end, www.mesh.com - "a location where consumers will be able to go to register their devices for the new services and set the levels of information they want to access from different places."
Om Malik turns out a pretty good interview with Ray, though of course the new benchmark is Sarah Lacy so that doesn't necessarily say much. Ray also talks about the enterprise scenario and how Amazon has situated themselves.
Dan Farber talks about FeedSync and how Microsoft is building "a seamless mesh that can synchronize content, services and applications across a variety of devices and user scenarios via the Web as a hub."

~~Microsoft PR~~ Dan also mentions what we've been shouting about for a while, that FeedSync is behind all this sharing; "users want to be able to access their data from any device, and for the data to be up-to-date, secure and without duplicate content."

Notice how none of these stories actually talk about what people will do once they have this mesh - remote access? storage? file synchronisation? Mary-Jo Foley filled in some gaps today, talking about Horizon being (amongst other things) a combination of FolderShare and SkyDrive. There's still a lot more to Horizon though, hence the almost deafening amount of noise being drummed up about mesh.

And to think not one of those people talking about mesh actually bothered to question why the url went to preview.mshorizon.com. I guess we'll just have to shout a little louder next time.

Ray Ozzie at Mix08 - Mesh, Horizon and FeedSync

Chris — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:07:00 GMT

So today at Mix08 Ray Ozzie went back to basics. If you compare the headings of his speech to that of his famous memo, there is a lot of common ground. So if you're an exec, how do you keep yourself entertained during these keynotes when repeating the same key concepts but can't start announcing product launches? Well Ozzie seems to have come up with an idea that we approve of, namely "how many unreleased product names / codenames can I fit in".

Mesh was the most obvious one by far yesterday, with several people picking up his constant references to it, see his speech notes linked above. Steve Clayton kindly highlighted the solitary mention of Horizon too, "As this product emerges just over the horizon". Given Steve is now working in this Software as a Service area, his one-line summary is pretty succinct and worth paying attention to: "...tech preview of a cloud sync service coming over the horizon"

So for all of you untrained in reading Ozzie, or conversely if you have done so too many times and actually want to see the goods (like we said, perfectionist), here's the LiveSide summary to what Ozzie said about:

Mesh (mesh.com)

- Device management, for example the reporting of location, centralised configuration and control,
- Unified data management (see below!)
- Unified application management and deployment via the web,

Horizon (mshorizon.com)

- Unified data management
- Synchronisation of files and folders across devices
-"The bi-directional synchronization of arbitrary feeds of all kinds across your devices and the Web, a kind of universal file synch." This should ring some bells - FeedSync anybody?

We often talk about the different "waves" of MSN and Windows Live services. What Ozzie talks about isn't some evolutionary update, this almost falls into the revolutionary category (its not out yet so no definites here). This is a "Wave X" compared to the "Wave 3" we're waiting on for Windows Live. Time to sit up and pay attention.

Let us know if you spotted any other codenames buried in the keynote and we'll add them in!

Silverlight 2 and Deep Zoom - Get ready to build your own photozooming collections

Chris — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 06:08:00 GMT

Steve Clayton just posted about part of the Silverlight 2 Mix08 demo, specifically a feature called Deep Zoom which is implemented over at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/. Deep Zoom allows users to smoothly and seamlessly zoom in and out of a collage of images, and was first demoed a year ago at Mix07 by Ray Ozzie. The Mix Online website has a video of it in action.

Now with the launch of Silverlight 2, these zooming capabilities are available for all developers to implement, thereby adding Photosynth / Seadragon technology to their web applications. As if that wasn't cool enough, there's something in the works for end-users too (Scoble get those tissues ready!)

For those of you with good memories, we have previously talked about a related Live Labs project - Windows Live PhotoZoom Alpha. Here's how we described it last time:

"Though not yet released, at a basic level PhotoZoom will allow users to add photos via an upload tool or import from an RSS/Atom feed. These can then be viewed as thumbnails or at their full resolution. Once processing by the server is complete, the zooming functionality is enabled."

Yes that's right, Microsoft is working on a service that allows users to recreate this zooming technology for their own photo albums. As we mentioned last year, the release of this service was dependent on the zooming technology in Silverlight being publicly shipped - which it now is!

If you haven't yet installed Silverlight 2, you may want to do so in order to experience the demo sites coming out of Mix08 - we'll let you know when PhotoZoom is available (soon all being well). If you really want to satisfy your curiousity in the meantime, we made a somewhat grainy video of a very old version of PhotoZoom in action. Disclaimer, it probably won't look too much like this now, and obviously the video was never WaggnerEdstrom approved.

(Image unashamedly stolen from Steve)

MIX 08 - Microsoft Unveils Next Generation Web Technologies at MIX

Sunshine — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:46:00 GMT

Today at MIX 08 Microsoft announced/unveiled the following:

· Internet Explorer 8 beta 1: Microsoft unveiled for the first time Internet Explorer 8, showcasing Internet Explorer’s commitment to developers. Internet Explorer 8 offers an unprecedented level of interoperability and tools, enabling developers to be more productive while delivering innovative experiences for end users on the Web. Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 for developers, released today, provides the most extensive support for Internet standards of any Microsoft browser and reduces the amount of time required to bring new experiences online.

· Silverlight 2 beta: Silverlight 2 supports managed code, includes the core of the Common Language Runtime and adds over two dozen user interface controls (such as button, check box, date controls, gridview and layout) that are designed to be used right out of the box, or to be tweaked with styles. If you need full control over the look and feel, the appearance of any control can be fully determined by templates and control behavior can be modified by hooking events, or ultimately by creating custom controls.

· Expression Studio 2 beta: Expression Studio 2 works seamlessly with Visual Studio to enable better designer and developer collaboration. New features include PHP support in Expression Web and support for Silverlight in Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Media Encoder and Expression Design.

· SQL Server Data Services: Microsoft announced a preview of SQL Server Data Services, a building block service designed for developers and businesses that need scalable, easily programmable and cost-effective data storage with robust database query capabilities.

Downloads available:
· Silverlight 2 beta: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight
· Internet Explorer 8 beta: http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8 (or from the Readiness Toolkit)
· Expression Studio 2 beta: http://www.microsoft.com/expression

More information and keynote videos at http://www.visitmix.com

Press release: Microsoft Unlocks the Power of the Web

LiveSide's Kip is also present at MIX 08, you can follow his whereabouts and more from our MIX 08 Page (there's also a link on the homepage at the right).

IE 8 Beta coming soon - Download pages up now (links not working

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:29:29 GMT

Well we're here in Las Vegas (more on that later), getting ready for Mix to officially start with the keynote this morning, and it looks like we're not the only ones getting ready. Thanks to LiveSide member pikalu0530, we can show you two web pages up now, all set to provide download links for IE8. Just a quick glance shows some new features - activities, and web slices:

(click on the images for the links:)

here's the download page:

As usual, it's tricky to get posts up from the convention, but we'll be monitoring the keynote, and bringing you more soon.

LiveSide at Mix

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:19:06 GMT

Well the Softies are descending on Vegas, and tomorrow I'll be there too - just in time to meet up with Long Zheng and company, who has a bit of a longer flight from Australia than I do from Seattle. Now the way these things seem to work is that conferences are perhaps the worst places imaginable to blog from - too busy, lousy internet connections, and no time to read other blogs or check the websites.

However we're going to try a few things, not sure that they are going to work but only one way to find out. In the sidebar on the home page is a link to a new page on LiveSide, with a video stream from Y!Live (very experimental, and temperamental, so this may or may not work), some links, including links to the keynote on Wednesday morning (9:30am Pacific: GMT-8), an IM session window you can use to chat when we're online, a link to a Spaces photo gallery, and more.

Now no promises that I'll be able to update the page much - I'm notorious for carrying a camera around all day and never taking pictures, but I'll try.

We're really looking forward to Mix, for a chance to meet up with some old friends and make some new contacts, to hear what Ballmer and Ozzie et al have to say, to soak up some Las Vegas sunshine (yeah right), and to have a little fun.

If you're at Mix, look me up in the blogger's lounge, I've got some new LiveSide stickers!

LiveSide at Mix 08

Big IE8 News: Will support standards by default

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 06:35:05 GMT

Microsoft has just posted a press release announcing that IE8 will support standards by default, which is a change from what had been previously announced (that IE8 would support IE7 "mode" by default, and render to standards only with the inclusion of a <meta> tag - read more at A List Apart). Ray Ozzie explains, from the press release:

“IE8 has been significantly enhanced, and was designed with great support for current Internet standards. This is evidenced by the fact that even in its first beta, IE8 correctly renders the popular test known as ‘Acid2,’ which was created by the Web community to promote real-world interoperability,” said Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect. “Our initial plan had been to use IE7-compatible behavior as the default setting for IE8, to minimize potential impact on the world’s existing Web sites. We have now decided to make our most current standards-based mode the default in IE8.

“This is obviously a complex issue, with important considerations on both sides,” Ozzie said. “On one hand, there are literally billions of Web pages designed to render on previous browser versions, including many sites that are no longer actively managed. On the other hand, there is a concrete benefit to Web designers if all vendors give priority to interoperability around commonly accepted standards as they evolve. After weighing these very legitimate concerns, we have decided to give top priority to support for these new Web standards. In keeping with the commitment we made in our Interoperability Principles of being even more transparent in how we support standards in our products, we will work with content publishers to ensure they fully understand the steps we are taking and will encourage them to use this beta period to update their sites to transition to the more current Web standards supported by IE8.”

While of course this is not strictly Windows Live news, it will be a big topic at Mix of course, and will also play an important role in Microsoft's standing in the web space.

You can read more on the IE Blog.

Windows Live Platform Announcements: Cool new toys just in time for Mix

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

With Mix08 less than a week away, details of what's coming are slowly creeping out: details of the IE8 beta, Scott Guthrie has posted details about Silverlight 2.0. And now the Windows Live Platform team is announcing today a series of new and updated features, including a new Messenger Library API, significant updates to Silverlight Streaming, an updated Windows Live Contacts API and Windows Live Photos API, and new Quick Apps and Visual Studio tools. Update: David Treadwell has just made the announcement on dev.live.com.

We'll go into more detail (and will be trying out ourselves) many of the new toys soon, but for now here's a quick look:

Messenger Library API beta
- This new addition to the Windows Live Platform family will allow third party developers to build their own complete custom Messenger applications on cross platform websites, using a new set of APIs to access and deliver Messenger functionality to websites. This means that websites could build their own front ends to Messenger on their websites, with all of the functionality (and a good deal more) of a Messenger client.
Silverlight Streaming updated:
- Silverlight Streaming, which has been in Alpha and offering 4gb of storage space and 22mb file limits, is now in beta.
- Upgraded to 10gb of storage space and 100mb+ file size limits
- 1400kbps streaming speeds (free for up to 500,000 minutes/mo)
- Better file manipulation with the ability to use Windows Explorer
- and better support for Visual Studio 2008 with Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio,
- You can take a look at a Hi-Def video streamed from Silverlight Streaming video here, and we'll have more soon.
Windows Live Contacts API Beta
- The Windows Live Contacts API Beta allows people to use their Windows Live contact information (including Hotmail, Messenger, and Mobile contacts) with any site—while keeping complete control of their data. Featuring Windows Live Delegation Authentication, the Contacts API can return Full or "invite" information (many sites just need name and primary email for invitations, and the Contacts API now allows that without exposing any other Windows Live Contacts information).
Windows Live Photo API CTP
- The updated Windows Live Photo API gives full control of photos stored on Spaces using the Atom Publishing Protocol or WebDAV, and now photos shown on a third party site are not required to go through the site - the API will call Spaces directly, and photos can be shown as thumbnails as well as time-limited permalinks (yeah, sounds contradictory...):
Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication
- Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication enables any web applications to request permission from users to access their Windows Live data
- Windows Live servers securely handle access control and user authentication
- Some Web sites would request Live ID and password – this is not necessary with Delegated Authentication
- Users can manage and revoke access at any time
Windows Live Quick Apps
- Two new Quick Apps, Contoso University and AdventureWorksResorts have been added, and Tafiti, the search app, has been updated. We'll have more on Tafiti and the Quick Apps soon, in the mean time, Angus has some more information on them.
Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio
- 4 key enhancements:
  - Windows Live Messenger IM Control integration (which Angus hinted at)
  - Deploy your controls to partially-trusted environments, including medium trust web hosting farms
  - Silverlight 2 SDK compatibility
  - No longer depends on ASP.NET Futures
ATOM Publishing Protocol
- Atom is a simple XML format for exchanging data in the form of feeds (which Windows Live Writer already supports)
- The Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) is a lightweight HTTP-based protocol for publishing and storing Atom-encoded feeds
- Windows Live services will align with a consistent AtomPub-based interface

This is a lot of information to throw down all at once - but we'll be going into more detail in the upcoming days, as well as hearing more about a lot of it at Mix. We're writing this under embargo a few hours before it's set to go live, so we don't have a lot of live links yet, but we're sure Angus will have more on his blog, and of course there will be lots of info at dev.live.com.

Microsoft moves towards IE8 beta

Chris — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 23:51:00 GMT

Looks like Microsoft is ramping up the teasers for Mix08. Activewin just posted the text from a Internet Explorer 8 Microsoft Connect invitation email.

"Greetings from the Internet Explorer Team! We are nearing the launch of Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and we will be making it available for the general public to download and test. IE8 Beta 1 is focused on the developer community, with the goal of gaining valuable feedback to improve Internet Explorer 8 during the development process..."

Not to be outdone, over on the IEBlog, they are talking about how websites can detect the new browser.

When released, the IE8 beta will introduce an updated User-Agent string. For IE8, we’ve simply replaced "MSIE 7.0" with "MSIE 8.0".

No surprises there then. Looks like this is just setting the stage for Mix08, which we'll talk about in more detail soon. We're hoping that IE8 will help the Windows & Windows Live Software+Services approach evolve, though the "roaming of favorites and browser settings" may still be some way off.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any signup pages for the IE8 beta yet, but we'll keep our eyes open.

Ray Ozzie at Mix08

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:38:00 GMT

If you took the time to check out our feed sampler you may have already noticed the news that Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft and the successor to Bill Gates when he steps down from daily duties this July, has been added as a speaker at Mix08, to join the stage with Scott Guthrie. From the VisitMix blog:

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie joins Scott Guthrie on stage as a keynote speaker at MIX08 on Wednesday, March 5, 2008. Ray will discuss Microsoft’s continued investment across the platform to deliver world class Web technologies and tools.

We're excited to hear what Ozzie has to say, hopefully some new information besides the "services disruption" speech that he's been giving for two years, but we think there's a good chance that there will be some new news on the horizon. LiveSide will be attending Mix08 (courtesy of Microsoft and the Mix n Mash event, but with no strings attached, of course), so we'll be bringing you the latest from what is turning out to be the premiere event of the year for Microsoft and live services. Of course we'll be snooping around a bit, too, so stay tuned!

Mix08 on the radar

Chris — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:50:00 GMT

You can tell how close a conference is getting by how frequent the talk about "swag" is. CES and Gizmodogate - done. Some other trade show happening this week that ~~nobody~~ everybody is talking about - done. Next up on our radar is Mix08, running between 5th-7th March, and thankfully the first design prototypes for the swag bags are already on show.

The next question is obviously "what's going to be in the bags"? Zune80 maybe? For the answer to that I think we'll have to wait a little while longer.

If you want even more buildup to the conference, you could do worse than checking out the weekly podcast. (Kip appears in episode 6 if you're interested).

Mix n Mash: on Mix08, Feedsync, Silverlight, and an hour with Bill Gates

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:08:00 GMT

LiveSide is an enthusiasts website. We follow Windows Live because we're intrigued by the promise of the software and services, and we're honored to have developed a following and a reputation as a reliable source of news about Windows Live. Most of the rewards we get are not monetary (by any means), but we're excited to watch our traffic steadily grow, thankful for the links we get from influential tech sites, and amazed, really, that we recently climbed as high as #30 on the Techmeme Leaderboard.

However our invitation to today's Mix n Mash event, held at the Executive Briefing Center on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, has been a highpoint, to say the least. LiveSide was invited, along with 8 other bloggers and web developers, to spend the day talking about Microsoft and more, concluding with an hour long conversation with Bill Gates.

While much of the day was not Windows Live specific (Chris has already posted on Feedsync, which was the focus of one presentation), we spent a very interesting day, starting with a 2 hour conversation about Silverlight with Scott Guthrie, a hands on demo of Surface and a demo of Popfly, a brief conceptual talk about Feedsync, an overview of adCenter Gatineau with some early looks at Beta 2 (expected sometime in early 2008), and then on to our hour with Bill Gates.

Here's the list of attendees:

Kip Kniskern – www.liveside.net staff writer

Molly Holzschlag – www.molly.com IE Standards

Jesse Warden – www.jessewarden.com Flash developer

Jonathan Snook – www.snook.ca/jonathan Web designer

Keith Peters – www.bit-101.com Flash developer

Kelly Goto – www.gotomobile.com Goto Media, Goto Mobile

Erik Natzke – http://jot.eriknatzke.com Flash developer

Julie Lerman – www.thedatafarm.com/blog Developer

Rob Howard – http://weblogs.asp.net/rhoward CEO, Telligent Systems (maker of Community Server)

We were not able to take individual pictures of Bill, or post recordings of the event, but a transcript of the conversation will be released tomorrow, along with a picture of us with the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft, which of course we will post with commentary. I asked Bill how he thought Windows Live was doing, and while there were no surprises in his answer, LiveSide still asked Bill Gates a Windows Live question, and he answered, and how cool is that?

The event was planned as a way to get conversations started about Mix08. We talked to Scott Guthrie about how Mix is becoming a platform for announcements, and when asked by Julie Lerman whether there would be anything at Mix08 that had never been disclosed before, any new technology, Scott said "yes". Later, during the Bill Gates question and answer period, when Molly Holzschlag asked Bill about Internet Explorer 8, one of the Microsoft employees clarified a discussion on when IE 8 would be discussed, saying "there will be disclosures on IE8 during the Mix08 timeframe". We were planning to go to Mix08 anyway (already booked hotel and airfare) but as each of the attendees was presented a pass to attend the conference in Las Vegas in March 2008, we might not need to wash dishes at the Las Vegas Convention Center to be able to afford the conference ;).

We'll be posting more about some of these technologies, and more about Mix soon (want to have the official transcript in hand before attempting to quote anything Bill Gates said). Been kind of a whirlwind of a day, but one that will be long remembered