I'm in the design phase of a project that is primarily an online browser based project written in ASP.NET. One requirement is that we need to provide methods for offline data editing & synchronization once Internet access is re-established.
Ideally, I'd like a solution that would both give me functionality to do the data synchronization as well as the UI side of things - I'd rather not, for example, have a browser-based UI for online work and also have to write & maintain offline applications for offline editing.
Is it fair to say that MS Sync provides a full framework for the data side of things (synchronizing between different versions of data, providing functionality for different protocols, etc) but does not do anything for the UI side of things? That's the impression that I've gotten from my research.
In contrast, something like Google Gears allows caching of HTML pages and some limited data syncing capabilities - in other words, a little of both the UI and the data side of things, but not as full-featured as MS sync when it comes to the real heavy lifting of data synchronization.
Just trying to understand what's out there, and make sure I'm not missing any functionality in Sync.
You are correct. Because Sync Framework is a generic platform for data sync across different scenarios, we don't currently provide any sort of HTML caching or anything like that. You can certainly use it to do offline sync, and that is one of the main areas we see it being used, but we haven't done anything to specifically target browsers.
AaronSDE, Microsoft Sync Framework
Proposed as answer byAaron GreeneFriday, October 2, 2009 8:06 PM
