OakLeaf Systems: SSCE Sync Designer Q&A and Screencast

Thursday, March 22, 2007

SSCE Sync Designer Q&A and Screencast

Sync Services pilgrims working with the Sync Designer preview in the Orcas March 2007 CTP had many of their questions answered by Steve Lasker's Additional Q&A on the Visual Studio Orcas Sync Designer post of March 21, 2007, which supplements Steve's original Q&A on OCS & Sync Services for ADO.NET post of March 18, 2007. First look at the Visual Studio Orcas Sync Designer and Going N Tier w/WCF, Synchronizing data using Sync Services for ADO.NET and SQL Server Compact Edition are a pair of screencast posts (dated March 22 and 23, 2007), which cover the Sync Designer that's scheduled to debut in Visual Studio Orcas. SSCE Sync Designer Q&A

Steve answers these questions to which I've added some related references:

Why does the Orcas Feb CTP Typed DataSet designer not work on Vista? I discovered this problem at the end of the aborted guided tour described in my Guided Tour of Orcas's Sync Services Designer for SSCE post of March 17, 2007.
Will the Sync Designer generate time based sync? I mentioned the lack of this feature in the same post.
Will tombstone records be automatically cleaned up? Rafik Robeal covers this topic in his Sync Services: Periodic Tombstone Cleanup post of February 16, 2006 to The Synchronizer blog.
How do I get my cached tables to be synchronized in a single transaction? Rafik's A nice gift from SQL Server 2005 SP2 to sync developers post discusses an SQL Server 2005 fix for potential timestamp errors with uncommitted transactions.
Once all the tables are placed in a single transaction, how do I control the order the tables are updated to handle parent/child relationships? Rafik discussed this issue in a "Synchronizing an 'Order'" thread in the Microsoft Synchronization Services for ADO.NET forum.
Does the sync runtime create relationships locally within SQLce? I mentioned this problem in conjunction with the problem of inability to save design changes to SSCE DataSets in the Guided Tour of Orcas's Sync Services Designer for SSCE post.
Does the sync runtime work with server side identities for PK's? The test harness I'm building has OrderID identity columns on the client and server sides and currently uses identity partitioning (similar to merge replication's approach) to identify the client machine that's the source of the update. Ultimately, the test harness will use ROWGUIDCOL columns.

SSCE Sync Designer Screencast—Part 1: First look at the Visual Studio Orcas Sync Designer

Steve's first Sync Designer (a.k.a. Cache Designer) screencast (25:49) demonstrates two-tier, one-way (download-only) synchronization of updates to reference data (Customers, Employees, and Shippers) for the Northwind Orders table. Reference (also called catalog) data, such as customer, vendor, or product lists, ordinarily are quite large but usually change relatively slowly. Two-tier, one-way sync for changes only is likely to be the most common Occasionally Connected System (OCS) scenario.

These are the only two lines of code in the Synchronize button's event handler that you need to sync the client with the server tables using the defaults you set in the designer:

Dim SyncAgent As NorthwindCacheSyncAgent = New NorthwindCacheSyncAgent

Dim SyncStats As Microsoft.Synchronization.Data.SyncStatistics = _ SyncAgent.Synchronize

The test harness's Synchronize button's event handler has about 100 lines of code to specify sync type and conflict handling, add and remove event handlers, and display SyncStatistics.

SSCE Sync Designer Screencast—Part 2: Going N Tier w/WCF, Synchronizing data using Sync Services for ADO.NET and SQL Server Compact Edition

The second screencast covers the n-tier scenario with a Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) service as an intermediary between the client and server. The architecture is similar to that Rafik Robeal demonstrated in his Demo III: Offline Application – WebService project.

Update 3/23/2007: My Sync Services demo project (a work in progress) has been moved to this new location: A Sync Services Bidirectional Test Harness. Added link to Part 2 of the screencast. Incorporated reference to original Sync Services Q&A in first paragraph.