ADO.NET and Microsoft Sync Services

Today I was digging Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 more and I found one amazing feature which is supported by SQL Server 2008. The feature is Sync Services for ADO.NET.

If you have many users of your application who used to roam around with lap top or palm top and don’t have constant internet connection than you can give them local copy of database, they can work with application and whenever network or internet available, they can synchronize their own local copy with main database. Isn’t it amazing feature? Yes, it is. This is just an example to make you understand about need this new service but this concept is much much bigger than what I have said.

Let us see what Microsoft is saying about this in its own words from Microsoft Website.

“Sync Services for ADO.NET is a Microsoft Sync Framework powered solution for synchronizing ADO.NET enabled databases in offline and collaboration scenarios. Sync Services for ADO.NET allows developers who are familiar with the concepts of ADO.NET to apply that knowledge to data synchronization through a very similar set of APIs to that of ADO.NET. Sync Services for ADO.NET provides the flexibility of a programming model like offline datasets and a richer synchronization feature set like that found in Merge replication. Sync Services for ADO.NET also supports synchronization over services, such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). ”

I have visited following few links to get an idea about this amazing service.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sync/bb887608.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sync/default.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/sync/archive/2008/09/16/now-available-sync-services-for-ado-net-on-windows-mobile-devices.aspx

Reference Collacted By: Ritesh Shah
http://www.sqlhub.com
Note: Microsoft Books online is a default reference of all articles but examples and explanations prepared by Ritesh Shah, founder of http://www.SQLHub.com