Announcing Microsoft Sync Framework Power Pack For SQL Azure CTP

PDC 2009 starts today and Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia kicked off todays keynote presentation. It gives me great pleasure to announce the public availability of the MSF power pack for SQL Azure. Its a CTP and we are really excited to see people download this and provide feedback around the direction we are heading w.r.t providing a synchronization story for SQL Azure. Head over to https://tinyurl.com/yhn76rrto download the Power pack.

The power pack provides the following components.

SQL Azure Data Sync Tool for SQL Server - This is a automated tool to migrate your on premise SQL server data to SQL Azure by setting up a strong synchronization relationship. Kelly Blue Book demonstrated this in the key note when they moved a table from their on premise database to SQL Azure.

SqlAzureSyncProvider - Power pack also brings in a new dll, named Microsoft.Synchronization.Data.SqlAzure.dll, that contains a brand new provider, SqlAzureProvider, that enables existing database providers to synchronize with SQL Azure. This also has the new SQL Azure specific Sync metadata provisioning API's.

Sql Azure Offline Visual Studio Plug-In - This adds a new item template for VS 2008 SP1 that enables you to setup offline synchronization relationships with SQL Azure.

The team has worked really hard to bring this to you and we would love any feedback you got. You can use the email feature here or send email to syncfdbk at microsoft dot com with your feedback.

We first discussed about Project "Huron" at last year's PDC and with this CTP we have taken the first steps toward the vision of a Data Hub in the sky. We have a more detailed post about this over at our Sync blog. Refer https://blogs.msdn.com/sync/archive/2009/11/17/announcing-sql-azure-data-sync-november-ctp-available-for-download.aspx

Mark Scurell, our lead PM, will be demonstrating this whole end to end walkthrough in his talk on Thursday 11/19 at 3 PM. For more information refer https://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/SVC23. He will take you through the process of synchronizing an on-premise database with SQL Azure, generate an offline cache from SQL Azure down to a SQL Server Compact database and move data between the client, SQL Azure and on-premise server all with just one single line of code.

Maheshwar Jayaraman