This is daft! The Live Mesh looks fantastic and the implications are even better. I have however, still managed to get myself into a mess.
I first connected my home machine (Harrold) to the Mesh and played around a little creating folders and uploading files to the desktop.
Right then, what about connecting other devices? Adding my work desktop and work laptop machines to the mesh was easy and worked as expected until I realised that I could not see the folders that I had created on the desktop.
Hold on a minute, looking at the list of devices from the pop-up off the system tray, showed that there was something strange going on. When viewed on my work machines, the pop-up showed the desktop and both the work machines but Harrold only showed the desktop and Harrold. What’s going on?
- The work machines are XP and Vista where as Harrold is XP, so the client OS isn’t the problem (not that I would have expected it to be).
- I’ve only got 1 Windows Live ID, so that’s not the issue.
However, looking at the system tray pop-ups alongside each other shows a couple of possibles:
- “Live Remote” is not currently enabled in the Live Framework sandbox” on Harrold.
- Beta vs Tech Preview? What happened there? Does it make a difference?
Well the “Live Remote” is just the name given to the facility that allows you to control a remote machine in the same way and using the same protocol, as is achieved using the traditional Terminal Services, now called Remote Desktop (MSDN Blog).
Point 2 is the reason for my problems. The difference between the Beta and Tech Preview versions is not just a different Live Framework Client. The live desktop link goes to a completely different location:
- Beta Live Desktop: https://www.mesh.com/web/Desktop.aspx
- CTP Live Desktop: https://developer.mesh-ctp.com/web/desktop.aspx
Getting Harrold onto the same environment as the work machines became easy. I just needed to uninstall the Live Framework Client (I still managed to mess this up a little and had to wipe some registry settings myself), reboot and then add Harrold as a new device in the normal way.
Sorted! Just need to figure out how to port the folders from the CTP desktop into the Beta (final) desktop…
Update - that bit was easy. The original desktop folders were saved to Harrold’s disk. I just copied them into the new Mesh folder location for the Beta and they appeared on the Live Desktop. Easy.