OakLeaf Systems: Sync Services for ADO.NET Overview

Steve Lasker's lengthy Q&A on OCS & Sync Services for ADO.NET post covers use of merge replication, Remote Data Access (RDA) and Sync Services for ADO.NET for synchronizing data between servers and clients (or publishers and subscribers) of Occasionally Connected Systems. As you'd expect, the emphasis is on Sync Services for ADO.NET with SQL Server Compact Edition (SSCE) v3.5.

Surprisingly, there's only one brief reference to the Sync Designer (in the answer to "Does Sync Services Support N Tier?") With the Sync Designer debuting in Orcas, I've been expecting more Q&A on the Sync Designer in the Microsoft Synchronization Services for ADO.NET forum. So far, searching on "designer" returns only two hits (one on 1/24/2007 and another 2/28/2007).

Maybe the lack of traffic is due to the strange name of the Orcas designer template: Local Database Cache (see Guided Tour of Orcas's Sync Services Designer for SSCE.) Data[base] Synchronization Service makes more sense to me. As of today, Google returned relevent hits on "Local Database Cache" only for Nick Randolph's and my posts. Same for "Sync Services Designer."

Update 3/21/2007: I should have searched for "local data cache" orcas, to pick up the Visual Basic Team blog's New Data Tools Features in Visual Studio Orcas post by Young Joo (3/13/2007). The post includes a "Local Data Cache with SQL Compact Edition" topic. The author omitted "base" and called the template "Local Data Cache." The article also:

Describes Hierarchical Updates with the new TableAdapterManager class, which simplifies code for executing updates on all of your DataSet's table adapters with the TableAdapterManager.UpdateAll(DataSet) method
Previews the newly-renamed Object Relational Designer (formerly the DLinq Designer)
Introduces n-tier support for typed DataSets by splitting the class file into another project.

Local Database Cache also suffers from lack of any documentation whatsoever. Try searching online help for "Local Database Cache" -- nada. (Hierarchical Update's help topics appear complete and Object Relational Designer has an unfinished walkthrough.)

Get The Bits

Here are OakLeaf links to details for downloading the current SSCE CTPs, RTMs and samples: