Kevin Hoffman

I was just flipping through my daily RSS feeds when I stumbled on a gem from the Live team, which you can read here . This is a fairly confusing post, but this is basically what I've been able to interpret from it:

• What we know as the Live Framework, that many of us have been developing with for nearly a year (bits released PDC 2008) will be disabled/deactivated/removed as of September 8th, 2009 (6 days from today)
• The end user experience for Live Mesh will remain untouched. In other words, people who have been using Live Mesh as a distributed file share system will be able to continue doing so. Pavan and I wrote a book sharing our chapters using Live Mesh so this is a good thing.
• The ability for developers to create Silverlight Mesh-Enabled Web Applications will be disabled. 
• If you have any data in a developer Live Framework mesh, you'd better get it out of there now because it will be removed.
• You should remove all your devices from developer meshes.

When I first read this, I was all "OMFGWTFNoMesh!?!" and exploded in front of my computer. After cleaning the bits of my exploded brain off the keyboard and looking at it again, some of it made sense. They are taking the Live Framework stuff down and theoretically coming up with a better, more in-depth, more unified API for Live. This step is long overdue because for a very, very long time developers have been confused because there is "old live framework" and then "live mesh/live framework" and then there's Azure and then there's a bunch of crap that's been labelled as part of "Live" for which there is no developer API.

What I expect to happen is that when they come back after hiatus, the Live developer experience will be a far more unified, robust, and more importantly, clear-and-concise experience. Unfortunately, all of us who have spent a truckload of time building MEWA prototypes are boned.

That said, if we eventually regain the ability to access/create/manipulate meshes from inside a Silverlight application, we can easily host a mesh-enabled web application in Azure. This doesn't change the fact that I'm pissed about the fact that MEWAs have suddenly become a dead-end for development and I have no idea if I will ever be able to develop an application that synchronizes across all Live Framework devices written in Silverlight again.

BOO.