OK, let me start by saying this isn't really an objective review of Mesh. That would be like asking your buddy about his new girlfriend. As far as he's concerned she's perfect and going to get better than perfect over time.
Caveat number two is that you won't find any amazing new revelations here about Mesh. Everything I'm going to say is shown in the demos on the Mesh.com page. You just have me saying it instead of Microsoft, and my only affiliation with MS is that I use their products. I run a user group dedicated to .Net development, but I am not beholden to them in any way.
Having given you those caveats, let me say that I'm very excited by the potential of Mesh.
I've been using it for a couple of days now and it has proven its worth to me. I have a project that I want to have available at home and at work. With Mesh I can simply go into the file explorer, right click on the folder and add it to Mesh.
When I get to the other computer, I go to File Explorer, My Computer and explore Live Mesh Folders. Once I see my folder, I can right click and tell it to download.
That's it. Now any changes I make on either computer are synced via the Mesh server and Live Desktop.
Kind of like a poor-man's source control but without versioning.
The coolest part is that it is transparent to me when I'm using it. I just fire up Visual Studio or Expression Blend and go nuts. When I go to the other computer the newest changes are there. Sweet.
You can also interact with the other computer via something akin to Remote Desktop. It is naturally slow via the net, but it works. You wouldn't want to rely heavily on this, but when you need something in a pinch, you can reach out and touch it. And copy it from remote to local.
What I'm waiting for is developer access. The ability to easily persist settings and data across devices is compelling.
To use my current project, Brains-On-A-Stick (podcast organizer) as an example; you could save your library data and preferences to Mesh and then have that info available on any machine you are using. Clearly you wouldn't want to put the podcasts themselves up there, but the information about the podcasts.
Coming in the next post: how to persist data and settings to Mesh without the developer APIs...