PDC 08 Summary - Project "Huron" and MSF V2 CTP

PDC 08 was last week and I wanted to summarize the PDC sync specific announcements. Hope every one had a chance to catch up on the all the impressive videos. First, Windows 7 looks impressive and I cant wait to dogfood the Beta build.

As I posted earlier, we had 3 Microsoft Sync Framework related presentations and here are the direct links to the recorded sessions.

Microsoft Sync Framework Advances – Presenter Lev Novik

Windows 7: Programming Sync Providers That Work Great with Windows – Presenter Jason Roberts

Sync Framework: Enterprise Data in the Cloud and on Devices (Presenter: Liam Cavanagh)

I am involved in Project Huron and wanted to talk briefly about what we discussed at PDC and what’s coming next. Project Huron intends to be a data hub in the cloud enabling data sharing and replication using the Sql Data Services and Microsoft Sync Framework. Here is the full snippet of Project Huron from our Sync blog.

Project Codename “Huron” – Leverage the power of SQL Data Services and Microsoft Sync Framework to build business data hubs in the cloud. Using this cloud based data hub, “Huron” provides a simpler, more convenient and less expensive way to:

· Publish databases to the cloud along with reports, forms and objects

· Subscribe to published data and automatically configure the local database for sync

· Make online changes through SQL Data Services and propagate those changes to subscribed users once they connect

· Enable scheduled and background synchronization of data changes through SQL Data Services and then on to other subscribed users

· Backup and restore of database applications to the cloud

We showed one such scenario of Project Huron at PDC. The PDC demo shows how customers using Access database can scale out and enable collaboration scenarios on the Access database by publishing it to the cloud. Customers interested in sharing or contributing to the data can subscribe to the hosted Access database. All changes are routed and synchronized in a peer to peer fashion through the cloud hub. We also demonstrated the “data hub” nature of the data in the cloud by downloading the same Access data to a Microsoft Compact database with full bi directional sync support. All components showed in the demo were running on live code. We used Microsoft Synchronization Framework V1 to build our AccessProvider, SDSProvider and SqlCESyncProvider. Acess and CE providers run locally on the box while the SDSProvider is running in our sync service running the cloud handling the SDS store. Feedback from PDC is very promising and the Access scale out/collaboration scenario seems to be a very common problem that customers run in to. Infact, we had a couple of guest posts over at the Access team blog and feedback from that blog has also been very promising. You can read the entire post at Announcement- Storing Access apps and data in the cloud and Video demos of Huron - Access and the SQL Server Data Services.

What’s next for Huron

We are looking for early adopters to participate in project Huron which will start very soon. If you are interested in participating then please send an email to DataLabs@Microsoft.com with “Huron beta” in the subject line.

We also announced public availability of the MSF v2 CTP which has some interesting new features built in. More info on MSF V2 CTP1 can be found here. We are very excited about Huron and cant wait to share it with early adopters.