What's New with Sync Framework

As a friend pointed out to me a few days ago, I have not provided much of an update on what is going on here in the Sync Framework team since last November. I think sometimes when I am so heads down on a product I can occasionally forget to give you an update on where we are. So I thought I would take a few minutes and let you know what we have been working on (or at least what I can say so far publiclyJ).

Sync Framework v2

Late last year we released a CTP (Community Technology Preview) of Sync Framework v2 and this release had support for things like filtering, simple provider creation and a number of other new features and performance improvements. We are making a lot of progress on this release along with additional new device support. You should expect to see another CTP of Sync Framework v2 before mid-year 2009.

Sync Services for ADO.NET v2

This product has also been a big focus for our group. We had previously released Sync Services for ADO.NET v2 along with Sync Framework v1. In addition we released the device support of Sync Services for ADO.NET. With this we are working quite hard on the next version release of Sync Services for ADO.NET along with some impressive performance testing results that we will be sharing along with this release. I am also dying to tell you about some of the large customer successes that we have been working with, but unfortunately I have to wait until their product actually ships. L

Project “Huron”

This project has been a large focus of mine for quite some time now. I am really pleased at how things are progressing with this project and hope to present some more of this to you in the next few months. I love the concept of being able to take any database on any device and with no work (or development) publish that data to the cloud and then invite others to subscribe to that data into a database of their choosing (on the device of their choice) and then share and contribute to it without having to worry about the authentication, security or scalability of your “data hub”. As you might imagine we have been working quite closely with the SQL Data Services team on this project to become our customer data hub in the cloud.

SyncToy 2.0

SyncToy is a free file synchronization utility that uses Sync Framework under the covers. This product along with the related “Anchorage” project is managed within our Sync Framework team. SyncToy just had its biggest month ever with a total of 136,610 downloads for the month of December putting it in the top 50 downloads of all Microsoft products!

So that is just a few of the things that have been keeping our team busy. So to Mike and the others who kindly read this blog on a regular basis, I will try to better on keeping you up-to-date on where we are!

Liam