Who are the primary targets?

"As a platform offering, it's a broad horizontal offering and is applicable to a very large class of applications, such as consumer apps and canonical Web 2.0 apps," Parasnis said. "That's a big class of audience, so we'll be going after people who are writing Web services today. But we also hope to get developers who build rich client apps; they need a seamless connection to Web services in the sky. So the second major developer target area is rich client app developers, to help them extend their stuff to the Web."

In the coming months, the Live Mesh team will be adding more productivity APIs to make it simple for developers to write for the platform.

"We'll start with APIs natural to Web development, and feature stuff like JSON, AJAX, Silverlight, managed code [and] Win32," Parasnis said.

Read more here about Live Mesh. 

In addition, he said there will be many opportunities for Microsoft's developer ecosystem to deliver tools and functionality to enhance mesh. Microsoft itself is introducing no real tooling tailored to the Mesh platform. "More than likely this is going to be a community play," Parasnis said.

However, the tooling story could present an opportunity for Microsoft's Volta, which its leader refers to as the programming model for the Web. Erik Meijer, an architect in the SQL Server group, says Volta is a technology for democratizing the Web, and the Rotunda technology that runs with Volta sounds useful for the Mesh environment.

Although Microsoft officials did not say Volta would have anything to do with the Mesh technology, Volta shares some key concepts with the Mesh strategy. Volta supports tier splitting, or enabling parts of a program to run off different tiers and allowing the developer to make the decision as to which tier later in the deployment process, rather than early on in the development of the application.