Live Framework CTP #3 – .NET: the developer’s Resource Model

There seems to be a lack of information on the web about the Live Framework Resource Model from a developer’s point of view, that means how can I address my mesh objects and more from my .NET code. Some Blog-Entries describe it more from a user’s standpoint respectively describe what is unveiled through the web services of the Live Operating Environment, but as .NET developer with the LiveFx libraries at hand that’s not interesting me much. Thus I want to briefly describe the resource/data model which you’re programming against in .NET (it has some similarities to the real class diagram) through the following article. Later on, in other posts I will go in depth on some of them.

The following diagram shows many (while not all) aspects of what you as developer should be worried about when juggling with Live Framework objects:

First things first: every collection shown above is a LiveItemCollection<TMeshItem, TResource>, where TMeshItem is of type MeshItem and TResource is of type Resource. Normally you get data out of the Resource, which can be extracted from the LiveItem via YourLiveItem.Resource.

Now I want to shortly describe the individual components.

LOE: the Live Operating Environment is the root of all functionality. Here you can connect to your Mesh and get all the information you need (In fact it’s much more than that, but this should be deferred at the moment).

• Contacts: Collection, which holds your contacts. One contact can contain some profiles and has many relevant contact data (Name, adresses, job title, profession etc.) connected to it.
• Mesh: Represents your whole mesh and the data, that it contains.
• Profiles: Respresents your personal profiles. The following kinds of profiles are available: General, AboutYou, ContactInfo, WorkInfo, Interests. Those profiles come from your Windows Live account, so Windows Live is basically integrated with some functions at the moment. I’m sure that there will be more interaction and features including Mesh and Windows Live in the future.

Mesh:

• Devices: Collection, that represents the different kinds of devices belonging to your mesh. Those are the same devices that are shown on the device ring in your browser. From a device object you can gather information like the online status, if it’s a local device or if it has an active remote connection.
• MeshObjects: Everything, which can contain data (data feeds) in your mesh. This can be folders (Type: LiveMeshFolder) and applications (Type: ApplicationInstance) for example.
• News: Collection of NewsItem objects, which represent global news in the mesh. There are several kinds of existing News types: LiveMesh.FileAdd, FolderAdd, MemberAdd, AppInstanceCreate, AppInstanceMemberAdd, UserMessagePost and more. But you’re not limited by these, because you can create news of your own type…

MeshObjects:

• DataFeeds: Collection of container items for data, that is included in the mesh object. Every data feed can have many data entries.
• Mappings: Collection, that contains mapping objects. Those indicate the devices this mesh object is mapped to.
• Members: Individuals, who have permission to this mesh object. There are several role type for mesh object members: Full, Author, Reader, Writer. With those the core Live services and your applications can handle access to mesh objects.
• News: Every mesh object can have several news, that are related to this object. As the global news, this is a LiveItemCollection of NewsItem objects.

DataFeeds:

• DataEntries: Data entries are everything that contains data in a data feed. This can be files or folders or user-specific data. A data entry can contain a media resource, with which a file (image, video, audio, word document, …) can be viewed and converted automatically.

These are just some first thoughts and introductionary information about the resource model from a developer’s view. As said before, I will blog later on specific topics of that, going more in depth…