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March 18, 2008 |
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Mobile
Synchronization |
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I am finally back to update my site and speak a
little bit with you…. The last three months were
very busy. I’ve taken the decision to direct my
focus to the mobile development. I’ve been building
my book library for the last few years with books
about mobile development and mobile market
opportunities. Now, it is about time to go for those
ever increasing mobile devices we call them smart
phones, YaY.
One thing that is staying with me though is sync!
Mobile is where the fight is for data
synchronization and offline experience. It is the
battle ground for sync and I am diving deeper into
it every day.
While we are at it, let me tell you that the first
CTP
for Sync Services for ADO.NET for devices is out! I
know you have been waiting for this to come and it
took longer that I personally expected, but it has
arrived and we need to take advantage of it as soon
as possible.
The other piece of news about sync was the release
of Microsoft Sync Framework
CTP2.
This release includes the final major interface
definitions. As the sync team promised, there won’t
be any major changes going forward, just driving
toward a final release some time later this year. It
is time to give it a try and post all your feedback
to the
forum.
Finally, I’ve been active with postings on my
blog.
Mainly writing about
MIX08
along with other interesting
mobile accelerator
release that features Sync
Services.
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January 3, 2008 |
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New Sync Resources |
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Happy New Year to all of You!! This last year has
been very good for me as I was able to achieve few
goals of mine. One of which is this very site that I
wanted to put out for few years now. 2007 was the
right time for it and I am glad it finally
materialized. That being said, there are a lot of
things to be done this year and I wanted to share as
much as I can with you and encourage you to share as
much as you can with the rest of us.
In this spirit I've
added two new links to the
resources
page:
- Bryant Likes
shares his improvement to the NTFS sync provider
sample that ships with Microsoft Sync Framework
SDK
- Memi Lavi from
Microsoft shares his work in building a data
sync application that uses Sync Services against
Oracle backend
Both are very
useful resources and will help a lot of us. So
thanks to the authors!
The
resources
page is fast becoming my favorite as I get to
promote the work that the community is doing to
advance and share sync technologies. If you have
something you want to share with us,
drop me a line
and I will add it to the page.
Have a great new
year!
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December 6, 2007 |
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New Demo: Batching
Changes |
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I've promised many of you on the
forums
to post a
demo
that shows off batching support in Sync Services.
Well, the time has come and I've it ready for you.
This demo is my personal favorite; why? Because it
gives me the feeling of more real world application
where there are a large number of changes being
synchronized. It is also more mature in terms of
user experience as it shows rich progress
information while downloading each batch.
One thing I need to
discuss a little bit more, possibly in future
blog
post is the different techniques for
implementing batching logic. In this
demo
I show one simple approach. But
there are multiple ideas that I wanted to share with
you. So stay tuned.
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November 26, 2007 |
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Final Releases: VS
2008, SQL CE 3.5, Sync Services v1 |
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The golden bits have gone out of the doors and the
RTM versions of all the cool stuff that you have
been experiencing with are ready for you to use in
building great new applications. I've updated the
links on all the sample
projects
to point to the RTM bits, there were no code changes
that I made to any of the samples though. If you ran
into any problem, the please
contact
me.
Excited!? Try out all
the new stuff, FREE!
Visual Studio 2008
Express Edition
Microsoft SQL Server Compact
3.5 and Microsoft Synchronization Services for
ADO.Net v1.0 for Windows Desktop
Microsoft SQL Server Compact
3.5 Books Online and Samples
Microsoft Synchronization
Services for ADO.NET Books Online
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November 14, 2007 |
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Microsoft Sync
Framework Released |
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It was a very interesting week in Las Vegas and
Barcelona. I was very exited and I won't go far as
to say that the whole development community is also
exited. I got to chat with developers in Vegas and
explain to them what the framework allows them to
do. The sky is the limits, pretty much. Now after
going public with the project and everybody knows
it. It is time to write more about how it works and
how you can use it to build offline and
collaboration applications. I am trying to stay as
active as I could be in the
forums
and by blogging. Other members of the team started
blogging as well and I am sure that all your
questions will be answered as we release more docs,
samples, whitepapers ... etc.
I've updated the resources page with the latest
articles on the framework and sync services. Also
try to check out the
MSDN developer center.
Yes, we have one now ...
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August 17, 2007 |
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Sync Services Beta
2 runtime, documentation and demos! |
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Time is moving fast! I cannot believe we are at beta
2 stage and quickly heading toward the release date.
In the last few weeks we have address several
customer requests in addition to some bugs we
discovered in house. I've to give credit also the
the documentation team who worked tirelessly to
bring you tons of information on how to take
advantage of this new runtime.
While too busy
making plans for the next phase of development for
the runtime for the future, I felt the need to
refresh the demos to get up to date with the current
beta 2 bits. Today, I posted new versions of
all the samples I've here on my web site. Check
them out and let me know if you encounter any
issues.
To download beta 2
bits, please visit the following links:
SQL Server Compact 3.5 Beta 2 for Windows
Desktop operating systems
SQL Server Compact 3.5 Beta 2 for Windows Mobile
SQL Server Compact 3.5 Documentation
Sync Services for ADO.NET Documentation
I am sure you know
by now that the discussion
forum
on sync services is pretty active
with some interesting discussion, feel free to post
questions and feedback.
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May 27, 2007 |
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Tombstone Cleanup
Demo |
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With beta 1 of sync services is in developers hands,
I thought about posting another demo that I've been
thinking about for quite sometime. This
demo shows you one
key task that any synchronization system needs to
handle. That is, the cleanup of tombstones. I
touched on this topic before on my
blog. What makes
this topic rich is the implications of deleting
tombstones while some clients might not have seen
them. In this
demo, I give you a
simple solution for how to detect and prevent stale
clients. The technique I used to do that shows
off one key architecture of synchronization services
framework which is the opaque anchor model. I
am sure many people will stop a bit and think about
the possibilities the opaque anchor model brings to
the table. I am sure many creative ideas will pop up
in your head too as you develop your offline
clients. Interesting stuff ...
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May 16, 2007 |
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Sync Services Beta
1 runtime, documentation and demos! |
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The new bits are out. Synchronization Services for
ADO.NET Beta 1 first appeared as part of Orcas beta
1 release. Orcas has the updated sync designer which
provides developers with RAD experience for building
offline applications (or database cache as referred
to it in Orcas). The runtime while ships with Orcas,
does not really depend on it. That said, we wanted
to release it as a separate component for people to
use without requiring them to install Orcas. The
standalone package was out a week later.
Now that you have access to the new
runtime and the
documentation, you
need updated demos. Today, I updated all the demo
downloads with a new version. The changes are minor,
just to get the projects to build successfully, no
feature cuts or anything like that. So with that you
can check out the
projects section
and download your favorite demo ... Have fun.
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May 6, 2007 |
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“Take Data
Offline…” article updated |
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I made few changes to my article "Take
Data Offline Using Microsoft Synchronization
Services for ADO.NET" to cover some of
the feedback I received from developers and internal
teams at Microsoft who are using Sync Services and
somehow ran into the article. Well, closing the loop
is always good a thing, so I encourage you to email
me with your suggestion, post a message to the
forum, or just vote for the article.
I will try to keep the article and this web site
current with the public CTP releases. So don’t let
the lack of activity during the month to give you
the impression that I abandoned it or something; not
true! I am just preparing more content ...
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March 28, 2007 |
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Decoupling Change
Tracking Metadata Demo |
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Well, I don't know about you but I really miss
writing those little demos for sync services. Today,
I posted
Demo VI. This one
is really interesting and I am sure many people will
relate to and say to themselves, "Yes! that's
exactly what I am looking for". The reason is that
it is basically a reaction to customers' feedback on
merge replication. Let me give you some context
here; when you enable merge replication on a table,
the schema of the table will change. In addition,
merge will add extra tables and triggers. Merge
customers don't mind the extra metadata tables or
the new triggers. What they frequently complain
about is the GUID column that merge adds to the base
table. People don't like to see anything or anybody
miss with their schema! Sounds familiar!?
Although, all the demos so far showed the base table
schema changed by adding extra columns to track
changes, it does not have to be that way. In this
demo, I will proof to you that it is rather simple
to build a decoupled change tracking layer using a
separate table and triggers. Check out the
demo and
let me know what
you think.
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March 26, 2007 |
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A Must-See Sync
Designer Screen Cast |
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The next release of Visual Studio codenamed ‘Orcas’
will have a pretty cool designer support for talking
data offline (referred to as ‘cache’ scenarios). The
March release of Orcas
CTP contains the
initial debut of the sync designer. The focus of the
sync designer is to help developers to get started
quickly by taking data offline for download only
scenarios. You then can take the application and
enable bi-directional scenario with few small code
modifications. Future CTPs will have a more complete
version that will allow you to implement n-tier
cache scenario as well.
The good news is that you don’t have to wait to see
sync designer in action.
Steve Lasker posted
two-part screen cast
for the sync designer showing the most recent
internal build of Orcas. I personally loved them.
Check them out and stay tuned for more sync goodies.
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March 18, 2007 |
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New Article Posted
on CodeProject |
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Couple of days ago I uploaded my first
article to
CodeProject
site. The article is an introduction to
Synchronization Services for ADO.NET. In the
article, I tried to give a quick overview of the
sync services architecture, supported scenarios, and
brief description of different components of the
framework. I choose my
first demo
application as sample to go along with the article
and wrote detailed walk through for it.
I think the Sync
Services is a great start to get developers to
understand sync technologies. There is very limited
material about sync topics and most of it is not
tailored toward application developers; sync
services is changing that. This article is my first.
I will use the feedback on the article as a guide
for future articles and contributions; please leave
your impressions on the article and feel free to
email me.
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March 9, 2007 |
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New Sync Services
Demo Showing Oracle as Backend Database |
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Long time has passed since my last demo. I got busy
and out of town for few days but now I am back with
this nice little demo that shows you the sync
services is for everyone no matter what database you
choose at the server side. That said, if you have
Oracle on the backend, you still can use Sync
Services to easily enable your applications to work
offline; Isn't that nice!? Anyways, I hope you will
enjoy it and as usual your feedback is welcome.
To download the demo visit the
projects page
To leave feedback, visit the
forum
or my
blog
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February 28, 2007 |
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Documenting Sync
Services Demos |
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Since I put the sync services demo out, many people
have contacted me with very positive feedback. This
encouraged me to make things even better and come up
with more demos. But before landing on a new demo
project I wanted to improve the existing demos by
giving more context on the feature of the sync
framework that each demo is highlighting. To do
that, I created a separate page for each demo and
added a lot of details, code snippets, snapshots
...etc. The pages are up and running, check the
projects
section to find the new content. I hope you like it
and I am always open for suggestions.
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February 6, 2007 |
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Forth Sync Services
Demo Application Posted |
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The series is growing
and taking its shape! Starting simple then move
slowly among feature in increasing complexity. The
last demo shows off the conflict handling that sync
services provides to developers. The UI greatly
enhanced to generate conflicts such that the new
code will be triggered presenting the conflict to
the user who is asked to choose how to resolve the
issue.
Visit the
projects page and
download the demo.
Here you can find the blog post for this demo.
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January 29, 2007 |
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Third Sync
Services Demo Application Posted |
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Many people were
asking about and N-Tier demo application that uses
Microsoft Synchronization Services for ADO.NET to
take data offline. Well, I posted one today that
took the third spot of the series of demos that I am
building for the new sync framework. Although
exposing the ServerSyncProvider as a web service is
not tricky, there are few issues with the code the
the VS spits out and this demo clarifies them and
shows how to get around them. Now what's next in my
demo series? well, I want to shed some light on
conflict detection and resolution. I am also
thinking about demo for monitoring and events.
Advanced topics like schema creation and client
registration is also on my list.
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January 28, 2007 |
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Second Sync
Services Demo Application Posted |
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This demo focuses on using TSQL\SProcs to build
SyncAdapter object. The demo extends the first
sample I posed few days ago and keeps that same look
and feel but replaces SyncAdapterBuilder code with
the new code. With TSQL or SProcs, developer now has
the full power to customize the sync logic.
Typically, you would write TSQL code in scenarios
DBA does not allow for custom code to be added to
the server. Stored Procedures provide better
performance, in addition they give more room to add
custom logic, for example, monitoring and auditing.
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January 25, 2007 |
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First Sync Services
Demo Application Posted |
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Interesting things are happening quickly. I tried to
post my first demo application in a series of
samples that I am preparing to the forum but
realized that I could not add attachments. The first
solution that popped up into my head is to start a blog in
msdn bloggers site, (you
cannot do that if you are not a microsoftie) and
post the package there. In one hand it is a good
solution to forum limitation, on the other I get to
finally start my blog for real this time. There are
a lot of topics that I want to cover about the sync
services internals, scenarios, tips and tricks. I
also want to use this site from more detailed
treatment of sync topics. More work to come ;)
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January 24, 2007 |
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Microsoft
Synchronization Services for ADO.NET CTP1 |
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This is a new framework for building offline
application similar to Outlook. The architecture of
the framework should be familiar to ADO.NET
developers as it builds on DataAdapter update model.
With ADO.NET data adapter and data sets, developers
can cache data in memory, change it and apply the
changes to the server. With Sync Services,
developers will be able to take data offline and
cache it locally on disk through SQLCE (SQL Server
Compact Edition) which ships as part of the CTP.
Moreover, developers will only need to download
incremental changes to the client data versus the
full set as with data adapter, and a much more...
Excited ..!? get your hands on the CTP and give it a
try:
- Download the public
CTP
- Post questions into a new
forum specially created for sync services
- Don't forget to visit
Steve Lasker blog for more info\demos on CE and
Sync Services
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to
sync guru web site!