Untangling the Microsoft mesh

"Mesh" was Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie's word of the day last week at Microsoft's Mix '08 conference. Ozzie waxed prolific on "social mesh," "device mesh," "seamless mesh" and more.

But what are the technological underpinnings that will allow users and developers to bring everything together into "your own personal device mesh with the Web"? How will the unified device management that "will enable your devices to report into a common service for status, for help, to report their location," in Ozzie's words, come into being?

Here are a few of the keys to the Microsoft mesh kingdom:

Microsoft Sync Framework (the technology formerly codenamed Harmony, and later, Ibiza): This is a software layer enabling data roaming and online-offline synchronization. Microsoft just release Community Technology Preview (CTP) 2 of the Sync Framework last week. There also is a toolkit in the works that will allow various applications, services and devices to take advantage of this online/offline synchronization.

Microsoft FeedSync: Feedsync a set of extensions to RSS and ATOM. It allows any sync engine to work in multimaster P2P environment. The Sync Famework has built in support for generating and consuming Feedsync feeds.

Microsoft Horizon: If you go to the www.mesh.com address owned by Microsoft, you are redirected to MSHorizon. Microsoft officials up and down the food chain are refusing to talk about Horizon. But if you understand what Microsoft's FolderShare does on the desktop and SkyDrive does in the cloud, think of Horizon as a combination of the two. Horizon is one component of Windows Live Core (another set of cloud-infrastructure technologies that Microsoft won't discuss yet.

At the crux of all of Microsoft's pie-in-the-sky cloud/utility/mesh computing talk is the Sync Framework, which is due to go to manufacturing in the third quarter of this year for both PCs and Windows Mobile systems. Microsoft is offering licensing arrangements to other vendors interested in making the framework available on non-Microsoft platforms.

During a session at the Microsoft's Mix '08 conference last week, Neil Padgett, a program manager for the Sync Framework, described the Sync Framework as a way to " keep local cache of data in sync with a remote endpoint."

Padgett noted that there are many conflicts, interruptions and other factors that make online-offline synchronization challenging.

"Correct sync algorithms are nontrivial. The devil is so much in the details with sync," Padgett said.

Padgett explained that Microsoft's Sync Framework can support arbitrary data stores and data types. Via various sync providers, developers can expose their endpoints to the sync framework. Programmers can build providers for a service (like web storage); a desktop app (like Outlook) or a device (dig camera, dig music player), he explained. There will be relational providers, an "Astoria" (ADO.Net data services framework) Offline provider, a FeedSync (RSS Simple Sharing Extensions) provider and various third-party providers, Padgett said.

I've unearthed a couple of interesting footnotes that may help shed more light on Microsoft's mesh/synchronization strategies.

First, Padgett is a former member of the WinFS (Windows File System) team. (He was the program manager in charge of the WinFS Synchronization application programming interfaces). WinFS was the uber-data/storage-management system cut from Longhorn a couple years back. Here's a description of the defunct WinFS:

"You can synchronize between multiple computers running WinFS, and also between different users, while granting access to only those you want to synchronize your data with. WinFS has the ability to synchronize any of your data (Contacts, Email, Documents, Photos etc) regardless of which application created it. Rave (a sample app for WinFS) allows you to select your data using Windows Explorer, and set it up for synchronization. You can then invite your friends and colleagues who have also installed WinFS to synchronize your data. Thus, you can share out your photos, contacts, and documents easily and have changes to them automatically replicated to others."

So the Sync Framework and all this multi-master-mesh madness is, in many ways, WinFS revitalized.

Another clue: At the Microsoft Financial Analyst last summer Ozzie outlined some of the layers of Microsoft's evolving service strategy. One layer is "cloud infrastructure services." Ozzie described this as the “utility computing fabric on which all of our online services run. Ozzie said the cloud infrastructure layer includes application frameworks for “horizontal scaling” and the storage, file systems, databases, and searchable storage.

Codename Horizon = horizontal scaling?

Microsoft is promising it will fill in the blanks in its mesh/synchronization strategy by the time it holds its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this October. In the interim, all educated guesses and guidance are welcome.