Professional Visual Studio 2012

Chapter 35

Synchronization Services

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• What an occasionally connected application is and why you would build an application that way
• Wiring up Synchronization Services to build an occasionally connected application
• Separating Synchronization Services across multiple tiers
• Performing both single and bidirectional synchronization

Application design has gone through many extremes, ranging from standalone applications that don’t share data, to public web applications in which everyone connects to the same data store. Recently, a flurry of peer-to-peer applications have appeared in which information is shared between nodes but no central data store exists. In the enterprise space, key buzzwords such as Software as a Service (SaaS) and Software and Services (S+S) highlight the transition from centralized data stores, through an era of outsourced data and application services, toward a hybrid model where data and services are combined within a rich application.

One of the reasons organizations have leaned toward web applications in the past has been the need to rationalize their data into a single central repository. Although rich client applications can work well across a low-latency network using the same data repository, they quickly become unusable if every action requires data to be communicated between the client and server over a slow public network. To reduce this latency, an alternative strategy is to synchronize a portion of the data repository to the ...