Introduction to Microsoft Sync Framework – Synchronization Framework for Enabling Roaming, Offline, and Collaboration Across Devices, Services & Apps
Philip Vaughn
Unfortunately, after 2 hours in Barcelona public buses, we were late for the first session of the day… I was supposed to go to a XNA development session. The only one of the event… Too bad. I used the time I had before the second session to put e-mail and blogging up to date.
I attended to a session about Sync Framework. It’s pretty nice! I hadn’t heard about it before this event. The big picture is captured the sentence
Your data wherever you are, on any PC, device or service without artificial barriers
This framework is meant to provide offline working and allow data to follow the user between systems.
As an offline working example we have Outlook Cached Mode, Mobile Work and Rich Experience on Web. By the other hand it allows collaboration as in Outlook contacts, Groove and Music Everywhere.
This framework allows applications to give a fast response, be always available, being optimized on storage questions (eg. Sending to server only what is needed).
The speaker talked about 3 main reasons to use Sync Framework.
It’s Powerfull. Deals with problems for us (conflicts, connection errors, corner cases)
It’s Flexible. Allows arbitrary data storages and data types, arbitrary protocols and topologies (one-way, peer-to-peer, etc.)
It’s Productive. Visual Studio 2008 is the ideal tool for quick development.
The first demo was called Contacts Anywhere. He created a contact entry in a custom application and synchronized it with Outlook and a mobile device.
A nice feature of this framework is that in a multiple synchronization hosts, when a conflict is solved between two of them, the conflict will not occur in the following synchronizations with other hosts, since it was already solved.
To work with Sync Framework you can use the built-in providers for file system synchronization, database synchronization and Simple Sharing Extensions (over RSS feeds).
There was a demo of the file system provider with the SyncToy application.
You can also add new providers to extend to other contexts.
I’ll try this framework as soon as I can. It is under development, but if you google it you can find a Beta version to try it out.
.NET Framework 3.5 End-to-End: Putting the Pieces Together - Part 1
Matt Winkler, David Aiken
This third session was a disappointment… The two speakers used DinnerNow demo (available at Codeplex) which uses a little of all .NET framework 3.5 for things live user interface (AJAX, WPF), WCF for communications, Smart Card for authentication, LINQ for data access and so on. Their objective was to show integration instead of isolated functionalities.
It started with a power failure! All light and computers down. They took a while to setup the session software again, while they bought time by speaking about nothing.
They showed this system in a user perspective, and then started to talk a little about each technology point. After LINQ and WCF I stopped paying attention… Speakers’ sense of humor was awful. 
(They were dressed as cookers…) And by making a presentation with such a large subject It became boring and too much superficial for me.
After half session I left to the entrance where I submitted the feedback form. After a while I gathered with the MSP team and went to the Exhibition Opening. I had contact with some companies and collected some goodies inside my TechEd Bag!
Then we had dinner, went to the hotel, crashed into André and Nelson’s room, I wrote these 3 posts, and went to sleeping (1:40 a.m.)!
A Tour of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5
Daniel Moth
Visual Studio 2008 was shown as a superset of Visual Studio 2005. It supports multi-targeting (as a told in last blog entry), it has a nice helper: removing unused imports :-P, allows nested master-pages in design-view and can be used as an IDE for different variations of javascript (IE specific, standard, Firefox, etc). It has a CSS manager with preview, and by default all appearance settings as fonts and colors are stored in CSS classes and not in-line.
In Visual Studio 2008, unit testing tools will be available in Professional Edition and not only in Enterprise, like in VS 2005.
Daniel made a demo which interested me a lot! Developing add-ins for Microsoft Office 2007. VS 2008 has a visual tool for Ribbon design, for example. A new feature of both C# and VB9 is the local type inference. This means that you don’t have to declare a type for a variable, because the compiler will analyze the code and set it into the correct type. You can declare a variable, assign an integer value (having intellisense for integer variables) and then assign a string (having intellisense for string values from that line on).
There is some syntactic sugar for C# as in-line functions (for example to assign a delegate without declaring a function), object initializers (when creating an object declare the default values for public properties). These features are compatible with .NET Framework 2.0, because the compiler creates the suitable IL definition.
Keynote
Speaker - S. Somasegar
TechEd first session was in the auditorium. It was huge! And crowned also.
The speaker was hard to understand, because his English or his accent (I can’t tell what the problem was) was awful.
But it was nice anyway. It was a quick overview about hot Microsoft Technologies. Not technically informative at all. It was just meant as a candy to drive us the next sessions.
He talked about Designer/Developers workflow and how Visual Studio and Expression Studio are a great help.
He gave us the information that over 1 million people are currently developing on Visual Studio .NET, and there was over 17 million downloads of this software. He highlighted that MSDN forums gives an answer to approximated 80% of posted questions.
Microsoft Platforms are meant to be used for a rookie hobbyist, academic students, designers and professionals/teams of development.
In this section I heard about a lot of things I didn’t knew:
- MSDN wiki - meant to the community of developers.
- MSDN Translation Wiki - designed to expand Visual Studio 8 languages to other languages. He talked about a translation project in Brazil.
Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 will be available for MSDN subscriptions in later November 2007.
Some of the new features of VS 2008 were split view (code/design), hierarchic tag selection, full CSS support, multi-targeting (choose the framework version for a project), LINQ designer, new Ajax Controls, intellisense and debugging support for javascript.
It was announced a license change that allow people to use VS to develop to other platforms than .NET framework. It was shown a demo of two World of Warcraft plugin development in VS using a customization pack that will soon be available in Codeplex. The first one was a board with information about scenario objects, and the other one was a RSS reader.
Another announcement was the release of Popfly Explorer Beta. A VS add-in that allows to use Popfly mashups in a webpage developed in VS Express Editions.
Finally at TechEd, and after a weekend without internet connection first thing we done was getting online.
