BB31
Sep 30th, 2008
Live Platform FeedSync and Mesh Synchronization Services

Speakers

Steven Lees, Program Manager, Microsoft blog http://blogs.msdn.com/stevenlees/
This was an entertaining session where Steven showed how to develop your own applications that take advantage of FeedSync and Live Mesh to synchronize data across devices and to the cloud. He showed how to use FeedSync and the Live Framework to integrate existing Web and client data with Live Mesh.
Steven explained the design principles (Comprehensive, Simple, Open) behind FeedSync. The following requirements must be met: create items on any device; items have a universal ID; notification of deletions; handles concurrent edits. / Mentioned Technologies
·  Live Desktop
·  Windows Mobile
·  Silverlight Media Viewer
·  FeedSync
·  Live Mesh

List of demos

Demo #1 / Features Live Sync. Steven took a picture of the audience and sync it through his Windows Mobile client to the desktop using SL and Live Mesh APIs
Demo #2 / Handling FeedSync with Visual Studio. In this demo Steven showed how to create an XML FeedSync from Visual Studio xmlns/sx
Demo #3 / Windows Client and Azure Silverlight Client app
Grocery list example with two clients accessing the same feed. This was a VB Windows client application and Silverlight Azure client application.


Conclusion

Steven concluded with the following:
·  Visit feedsync.org for more information on the specifications, including samples
·  Visit msdn.com/sync and dev.live.com
·  Check out the associated sessions: BB34, BB35, BB31, BB30

Q & A

At the conclusion of the session the following questions were answered

Can you be notified when something new is added?

Yes, but for now you need to monitor the news feed yourself.

You used different sync code in your demo when on the Windows client?

Yes, just a library of functions for Feedsync.

How do these demos relate to the Sync Framework?

Sync Framework handles metadata management. FeedSync is the lightweight implementation of this.


Any guidance on RSS vs ATOM?

ATOM is a good choice for CRUD applications.

Can we force peer-to-peer?

Look at the Sync Framework for examples of how to do this.

How does the client know the data is the same in an enclosure when a conflict is resolved?

The client needs to determine if the link has changed.

Can you detect the network presence?

Yes, but you need to use the .NET Framework for that.