Microsoft PDC: Will the real cloud platform please stand up?

At the upcoming Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, "platform" will be the watchword of the day. I'm going to be interested to see which cloud platform of the many that Microsoft is expected to unveil will get top billing. It's no secret that the Softies are going to highlight the Live Mesh platform at the late October confab. At its Mix conference in April, Microsoft took the wraps off the Live Mesh "user experiences" and focused on the device synchronization and collaboration capabilities of Mesh. Microsoft developers did discuss at a high level the Mesh developer platform at that time, as well, but only at a high level. At the PDC, the Mesh platform is going to get the royal (beta) rollout treatment. The Mesh platform consists of several different layers. At the lowest level, there are programming interfaces and frameworks that will allow developers to write software and services that bridge the software/services development divide. On top of those frameworks will be a set of infrastructure services, like storage, identity/security, pub/sub, communications and remote device management. Microsoft is expected to emphasize the ability of the Mesh platform to help developers push their applications to users on multiple devices. The goal? To make applications and services more easily findable, installable and shareable virally. Live Mesh may be Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie's pet project, but it isn't the only platform that the Softies will be touting at the conference. Red Dog, a k a Microsoft's "cloud OS" is another. From what I've heard, Red Dog is going to be a set of operating- system-level components that comprise the foundation of Microsoft's hosted platform for developers. Think of it as Microsoft's equivalent to Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). Then there's the elusive "Zurich," which Microsoft continues to refuse to acknowledge, even though -- at one point -- the company acknowledged publicly on its own Web site that Zurich was "extending Microsoft’s .NET application development technologies to the Internet ‘cloud.'" I've heard from some folks that Zurich is Microsoft's uber-services platform, something like Amazon Web Services (of which EC2 is a part). If the Amazon analogy holds, Red Dog, SQL Services Development Services (SSDS) , BizTalk Services and other existing and forthcoming cloud-related technologies might all be part of Zurich. Is the Mesh platform a subset of Zurich? Is Red Dog part of the Mesh platform?

Are any of these related, other than the fact they're being touted as being the crux of Microsoft's cloud "platform? I have a feeling even if the two are being in completely separate silos, Microsoft will find some way to make customers, partners and competitors believe that they are intertwined and not overlapping. (Microsoft won't comment on any of its planned PDC announcements, in case you were wondering why I can't simply ask how and if all of these elements fit together.) There are still more platforms set to be discussed and detailed at the PDC. There's the Oslo modeling platform, the  .Net 4.0 platform and the Windows 7 platform, too. While these are software platforms more than cloud ones, you can bet there's a cloud piece of each of them that Microsoft will play up at the PDC. In the old days, Microsoft used to pit internal teams against one another, allowing the best platform to "win." If you're a developer trying to figure out how to target Microsoft's cloud, which platform -- or combination of platforms -- should you be betting on? Microsoft has a lot of explaining to do, come late October....