SyncFx – Microsoft Sync Framework Toolkit

Announcements

• Sync Framework Toolkit now available for download (Updated on 9/9/2011)

  Nina HMicrosoft EmployeeSaturday, September 10, 2011 7:38 AM

  The Sync Framework Toolkit extends the Sync Framework capabilities for building offline applications, making it easier to expose data for synchronization to applications running on any client platform. Sync Framework 2.1 required clients to be based on Windows. This toolkit allows other Microsoft platforms to be used for offline clients such as Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, and Windows Mobile; in addition non-Microsoft platforms such as iPhone, Android, and Blackberry can be utilized as well as HTML.

  The Sync Framework Toolkit provides all the features enabled by the Sync Framework 4.0 October 2010 CTP. We are releasing the toolkit as source code samples on MSDN with the source code utilizing Sync Framework 2.1. Source code provides the flexibility to customize or extend the capabilities we have provided to suit your specific requirements. The client-side source code in the package is released under the Apache 2.0 license and the server-side source code under the MS-LPL license.

  The toolkit is available for download on MSDN at: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Sync-Framework-Toolkit-4dc10f0e.

  We will keep the forum used for Sync Framework V4 CTP available for community discussion and community support.
  
  Thanks,
  Sync Framework Team
  

• Sync Framework V4 Update

  Mark ScurrellMicrosoft EmployeeWednesday, March 30, 2011 5:41 PM

  At PDC 2010 we announced and released Sync Framework V4 CTP.  The main capability available in the CTP was greatly enhanced support for offline clients.  In particular, we added the ability to easily create web services to synchronize data from SQL Server or SQL Azure databases with offline clients built on any platform - Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, iPhone or any client platform with any local client store.  The final release of V4 was planned for 2011 and we were targeting the first half of this year for general availability.

   

  This post is to inform you that we have updated our plans and postponed the V4 release for the time being.  We do expect to release Sync Framework V4 in the future and will let you know the new release date when available, but it is unlikely the release will be available in 2011.

   

  There has been a great deal of interest in our V4 release, with lots of participation in the CTP.  In lieu of a formal release, we are planning to make the V4 CTP functionality available as source code samples on MSDN Code Gallery in the next few months – server code, client code and client samples.  The source code samples will utilize and depend on Sync Framework V2.1 (on the server), as was the case for the CTP.  UPDATE: We will make the code available by end August 2011.

   

  This was a difficult decision for the team.  We are currently focusing on the delivery of SQL Azure Data Sync which is a service providing data synchronization capabilities for SQL Azure that will be released later this year.  SQL Azure Data Sync heavily utilizes Sync Framework internally.

   

  Here are a few common questions we’ve received:

   

  ·         Q: Will you stop supporting Sync Framework V2.1?

  ·         A: No.  Sync Framework V2.1 is a released product and will continue to be supported, both formally and via the MSDN forums.

   

  ·         Q: Does this mean that the Sync Framework is being phased out?

  ·         A: No.  We expect to provide future versions of the synchronization developer platform.  SQL Azure Data Sync is built on top of Sync Framework and we continue to invest in data synchronization capabilities.  We believe that both end-user services and development platform are important to provide a complete stack for customers.  With Sync Framework V2.1 being available we are currently focusing on the delivery of the end-user service.

   

  ·         Q: When do you expect Sync Framework V4 will be released?

  ·         A: A potential release date has not been set.

   

  ·         Q: How do the offline capabilities of Sync Framework V4 relate to the recently announced “reference data caching” capabilities for OData?

  ·         A: “Reference data caching” is being proposed as a future additional capability of the OData protocol.  It specifically targets the one-way download scenario for reference data.  We believe this is a common scenario and is sufficiently straightforward to integrate directly into the OData protocol.  We are exploring how far to integrate sync capabilities into the OData protocol vs. potentially layering more sync capabilities on top of OData, which is the approach we took with the Sync Framework V4 CTP.  We look forward to your feedback in this area as we explore together with the OData community.

   

  Regards,

  Sync Framework team