When we talk about Live Mesh as being something that be connected to programmatically we talk about the Live Operating Environment (or LOE for short). In a previous life this was actually called the MESH Operating Environment and that is why when you look in Task Manager, and you have the LOE developer client installed, you will see Moe.exe listed (at the time of writing you will anyway):
Given that LOE is a synchronisation platform between devices and the cloud there are actually 2 instances of LOE that can be connected to programmatically; the one running on your device which we call “local LOE” or the one running in the cloud, called “cloud LOE”. The Live Framework (aka LiveFX) provides a static method for connecting to each of these:
- LiveOperatingEnvironment.Connect() &
- LiveOperatingEnvironment.ConnectLocal()
plus two asynchronous methods for doing the same:
- LiveOperatingEnvironment.ConnectAsync() &
- LiveOperatingEnvironment.ConnectLocalAsync()
In my last blog entry Recursing Hierarchical Dataentries I provided a simple piece of code that recursed over all the items in a person’s Mesh and outputted the title of each item to the command-line. I’ve expanded that code slightly to prompt the user whether they want to connect to cloud or local MOE and then measure how long it takes to output all the info. Just for illustration here’s how the app starts up:
and after running it I get a report of how long it took and how many objects are in my Mesh:
The screenshot above was taken after connecting to local LOE, as you can see it found 336 (95 + 0 + 240 + 1) items in my Mesh in 3.36 seconds. Let’s compare that to when I connect to cloud LOE:
The same 336 objects recursed in 2232 seconds. Notwithstanding the fact that this was running on a virtual machine that is a startlingly big difference, connecting to cloud LOE caused this simple app to take 664 times longer to loop over the contents of my Mesh. This isn’t a slow connection (on the host) either as Speedtest confirms:
Obviously don’t take these figures as being representative of true performance because this is a very crude test but it does highlight something that should be obvious anyway, connecting to local LOE is always going to be quicker than going to the cloud for the same information.
If you want to have a go at running this for yourself then get the code from Codeplex at My Mesh Recursor. There is also an installer available that will install the console app for you – very easy indeed. The app relies on having access to the Mesh developer CTP at http://developer.mesh-ctp.com so if you haven’t gt access to that don’t bother installing this.
Comments are welcome.
-Jamie
If you want to read more about what I have to say about Live Framework head to http://blogs.conchango.com/jamiethomson/archive/tags/Live+Framework/default.aspx