Microsoft’s recent discussion of mesh computing raises a few questions. For some details on what it is, go to the LiveMesh pages. The company has rattled about a lot of ‘Live” initatives, but this may be the first one with legs. Now, we are going to drop the mesh term immediately, and start to use ‘Cloud’ to describe whatever it is Ray Ozzie has been concocting - it is a more widely used term. Just think of it as a Grid on steroids, or rather a subset of a Grid on steroids.

Now the questions.

Who will the Microsoft Cloud effect? Seems like consumers are the target. It appears for now a way to connect one’s different electronic files and such. It may sneak into the enterprise, of course, just like Lotus 1-2-3 did.

Will it work? The answer there is yes, it will work about as well as most software; meaning, it will work much of the time, but you will come to curse it on occasion. Does IT have higher standards than individuals do on the question ‘does it work?’ - well, that is an open question.

Who is the competition? Basically, it is the nemesis called Google. Google has its own Cloud computing solution a’brewing, and Microsoft will have to meet the Valley Search Wizards of Googledom on that plain of battle because…well, because that’s what they are supposed to do. This is not mano on mano, no. It is geek-o on geek-o.

Of course, a wild card in the Cloud race is Yahoo. As you may recall, Microsoft is courting Yahoo with all the ardor of a CPA romancing a distant society deb. It is hard to guess how that will play out, but there is much about Yahoo that Microsoft will have to come to grips with. Yahoo has its own Cloud computing initiative - it has a lot of computers sitting around down on the farm, you know - which, like a lot of things at Yahoo, does not exactly work the same way as the Microsoft cloud alternative. As Blogster Par Excellance Mary Jo Foley points out, meshing these two platforms could be a real mess. Well put, Foley!

A whole new thing called ‘Web 2.0′ has arisen along with the AJAX phoenix. AJAX can improve responsiveness of networked applications by getting the client to do more work. But the first request from and the first download to the client-side cache can incur a dramatic performance hit.

Microsoft Research boffins have been cogitating on this, and have produce a PDF paper discussing Doloto, a system that analyzes application workloads and automatically performs code splitting of existing large Web 2.0 applications.

Since code download is interleaved with application execution, users can start interacting with the Web application much sooner, without waiting for the code that implements extra, unused features, using the Doloto framework, the team writes.

Microsoft development honcho Soma Somasegar reports that a Visual C++ 2008 Feature pack has shipped. In January the pack came out in beta.

MFC components included in the pack allow developers to create applications with the look and feel of Microsoft Office, Visual Studio and Internet Explorer. The VC++ 2008 pack can be downloaded from Microsoft’s Download Center.

That’s the good news. The bad news is VB6 has reached end-of-life status in terms of Microsoft formal support. The company has recently created a webcast explaining what that means, and what avenues are open for application migration.

Microsoft is working to make it easier for Eclipse developers write code for Windows apps. Microsoft will provide engineering support to allow Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Such support would make it easier to Java developers to write applications that look and feel like Windows Vista. San Ramji, director of the Open Source Software Lab explains in his blog-posting Supernova, “We’re committing to improve this technology with direct support from our engineering teams and the Open Source Software Lab, with the goal of a first-class authoring experience for Java developers.”

Microsoft has released the Silverlight 2.0 lab so you can program this innovative technology while working in a safe, supportive environment. Some of the labs include: Basic Concepts, Concepts in building Connected Applications, Building Reusable Controls, Exploring the Integration between Silverlight and its browser host, and Dynamic Animation. All tutorials need Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Runtime, Visual Studio 2008 Tools and Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK installed.

You can also find out about new Silverlight Essential Training with how to add video, animations, and interactive features such as drag-and-drop functionality.