TechEd 2007 - Introduction to Microsoft Sync Framework

Introduction to Microsoft Sync Framework – Synchronization Framework for Enabling Roaming, Offline, and Collaboration Across Devices, Services & Apps

Philip Vaughn

Unfortunately, after 2 hours in Barcelona public buses, we were late for the first session of the day… I was supposed to go to a XNA development session. The only one of the event… Too bad. I used the time I had before the second session to put e-mail and blogging up to date.

I attended to a session about Sync Framework. It’s pretty nice! I hadn’t heard about it before this event. The big picture is captured the sentence

Your data wherever you are, on any PC, device or service without artificial barriers

This framework is meant to provide offline working and allow data to follow the user between systems.

As an offline working example we have Outlook Cached Mode, Mobile Work and Rich Experience on Web. By the other hand it allows collaboration as in Outlook contacts, Groove and Music Everywhere.

This framework allows applications to give a fast response, be always available, being optimized on storage questions (eg. Sending to server only what is needed).

The speaker talked about 3 main reasons to use Sync Framework.

It’s Powerfull. Deals with problems for us (conflicts, connection errors, corner cases)

It’s Flexible. Allows arbitrary data storages and data types, arbitrary protocols and topologies (one-way, peer-to-peer, etc.)

It’s Productive. Visual Studio 2008 is the ideal tool for quick development.

The first demo was called Contacts Anywhere. He created a contact entry in a custom application and synchronized it with Outlook and a mobile device.

A nice feature of this framework is that in a multiple synchronization hosts, when a conflict is solved between two of them, the conflict will not occur in the following synchronizations with other hosts, since it was already solved.

To work with Sync Framework you can use the built-in providers for file system synchronization, database synchronization and Simple Sharing Extensions (over RSS feeds).

There was a demo of the file system provider with the SyncToy application.

You can also add new providers to extend to other contexts.

I’ll try this framework as soon as I can. It is under development, but if you google it you can find a Beta version to try it out.