5. November Microsoft unveiled the complete Microsoft Sync Framework at Tech-Ed Developer Europe 2007 in Barcelona.
The reason I’m posting this is that I held a presentation about Sync Services for ADO.NET at the MSDN Live fall 2007 event in Norway. Sync Services for ADO.NET is just a component in this framework that focus on relational data. The Sync Framework has more to offer that just syncing relational tables.
Microsoft Sync Framework is a new framework and a runtime (platform) for adding sync, roaming and offline capabilities into applications. It supports peer-to-peer and client-server scenarios. It’s agnostic of data types, stores and protocols.
The Framework also ships with components for file system sync, SSE (Simple Sharing Extension) and lots of other stuff. File system sync is interesting because it’s a realistic scenario while developing applications with offline capabilities. Let’s say you developing a smart client (win form) that consumes data via web services and documents from a file-share accessible with-in an intranet. Then you can use this feature to sync documents while the client is located inside the intranet. Then the files will be accessible while the client is outside. If the user makes some changes in the files, they will be synced as well. SSE is interesting if you add the protocol to open standard formats such as RSS. Let’s say you building an enterprise application with RSS support. If you enable SSE into the RSS feeds then your clients that use Microsoft sync Framework will get out-of-the-box sync capabilities with these sources. That’s cool!
Another cool thing is the endpoints for synchronization have been loosely coupled. You can use an exchange endpoint to sync with a relation database endpoint. Let’s say you want to sync a person’s calendar from exchange into a relation database on the client.
It’s a shame that I’m not attending Tech-Ed Developers Europe this year.
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