Microsoft Sync Framework : SQL Data Services

New Sample - WCF for Devices

liamca — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Two of our MVPs (José Miguel Torres and Cesar Fong) recently posted an excellent end to end WCF sample for devices that’s worth a look. They did an excellent job of describing the various components and it is a must see for developers thinking about getting their feet wet building offline applications for Windows Mobile. Thanks again to Jose and Cesar for contributing these samples to the community!

http://synccomm.codeplex.com/

Regards,

Sean Kelley
Program Manager, Microsoft

TechEd 2009 - Building Applications with Microsoft SQL Data Services and Windows Azure (DAT316)

liamca — Tue, 05 May 2009 03:06:00 GMT

Hopefully a number of you will be attending this years TechEd in Los Angeles. This year I will be co-presenting with David Robinson where we will be discussing SQL Data Services and our "Huron" Data Hub project. I am really looking forward to showing you our latest demo so I hope you can all make it. If you are not able to make the session but are at the conference, I will also be at the SQL Data Services booth for quite a bit of the time, so please stop by so we can talk "sync".

Here is the abstract for the session:

"Are you looking to reduce the costs of building and maintaining enterprise applications? Do you want to extend the reach of your applications across multiple devices, locations and partners? SQL Data Services and Windows Azure provides you a friction free, highly scalable platform for building applications. The scale and reach of the cloud lights up a new class of application scenarios. Come see how easy it is to consume SQL Data Services from within Windows Azure. In addition, we dive into Microsoft's new "Data Hub" for businesses and see how this SQL Data Services powered synchronization service allows for data aggregation within the Hub to provide straightforward data sharing between on-premises databases, business partners, remote offices, and mobile users".

See you there!

Liam Cavanagh

The Clouds are clearing in Redmond

liamca — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:56:00 GMT

After a healthy dumping of March snow here in Redmond yesterday, the clouds have changed and it is now a clear and sunny day. Kind of appropriate I think given the announcement from our sister team SQL Data Services this morning. In today’s announcement it was stated that SQL Data Services:

"will become the first relational database service in the market to provide customers with the ability to use existing investments in T-SQL development and use a full relational data model in the Cloud"

We in the Sync Framework team have been patiently waiting for this big announcement. Just like the customers that have asked for this change, for our project "Huron" this has been an incredibly positive change in our goal to allow databases to be shared via the cloud. For us it has:

Greatly simplified the development effort. Now we can base even more of our architecture on Sync Services for ADO.NET technology. Specifically the server provider in Sync Services for ADO.NET, used to powers companies with scales of 80,000 mobile workers can now also be used within our hosted sync service.
Provided a well known and proven architecture and allows us to spend more resources on making the client side experience and sync service even better -- my personal goal is that an Access, SQL Compact or SQL Server user can start sharing their database via the cloud in under 3 minutes.
Allowed an even greater level of scalability. Previously, the architecture of SQL Data Services required us to transform from relational to entity format. Now, we will be able to maintain the relational format of the data which will have a big impact on performance.
Enabled the use of SQL Server integrated change tracking capabilities within our sync service for even greater sync and change tracking performance

In fact, we have been working for some time on a prototype of “Huron” using a new sync service hosted within Azure against relational cloud storage. Keep an eye out here for a webcast where I will walk through this and some of our other project goals.

While I am at it, I also wanted to send a thank-you to all of those who took the time to join our “Huron” early adopter program at SQLServicesLabs.com. As some of you may have noticed we have stopped accepting applications (for now). This is simply because we could not keep up with the responses and did not feel we could support any more customers in the early adopter stages of our program. If anything, we have heard loud and clear your requirements in this area, but please feel free to continue to send me your thoughts and ideas.

I am not quite ready to talk about the public release date other than to state that the goal is to get something into your hands to play with by the end of this year.

Stay tuned for more!

Liam Cavanagh