Brust Blog: Live Mesh Still Kicking -- Visual Studio Magazine

By Andrew J. Brust

Sync This!

Liveside.net and Mary Jo Foley are reporting that rumors of Live Mesh’s death are greatly exaggerated. That’s excellent, as far as I’m concerned. Mesh is a good product, and it would be a huge pain if I had to switch to something else were Redmond to kill it.

Meanwhile, I continue to find it fascinating how many sync standards Microsoft has across its product set. Here’s a list of them (excluding Live Sync and Live Mesh), and I’m betting it’s not comprehensive. Can you think of others?

ActiveSync (for Windows Mobile over USB and BlueTooth)
Exchange Active Sync (used over the Internet, including 3G services)
Windows Offline Folders
Windows Media Player sync
Zune sync
Sync Framework and ADO.NET Sync Services (for database synchronization)
SQL Server Replication
Access/Jet database replication and JRO (Jet Replication Objects)
SharePoint/Outlook list/library synchronization
OneNote shared notebook synchronization
Live Messenger Sharing Folders

I formulated a similar list almost two years ago, when I wrote a post on my first impressions of Live Mesh. But things here are not getting better, and they need to. I’d like to see a common sync facility that every Microsoft product needing such services could build upon. Just (please) don’t base it on the Entity Framework!

Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 02/25/2010

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Uno Platform Wants Microsoft to Improve .NET WebAssembly in Two Ways

Uno Platform, a third-party dev tooling specialist that caters to .NET developers, published a report on the state of WebAssembly, addressing some shortcomings in the .NET implementation it would like to see Microsoft address.
Random Neighborhoods Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the random neighborhoods regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other ML regression techniques, advantages are that it can handle both large and small datasets, and the results are highly interpretable.
As Some Orgs Restrict DeepSeek AI Usage, Microsoft Offers Models and Dev Guidance

While some organizations are restricting employee usage of the new open source DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company due to data collection concerns, Microsoft has taken a different approach.
Useful New-ish Features in .NET/C#

We often hear about the big new features in .NET or C#, but what about all of those lesser known, but useful new features? How exactly do you use constructs like collection indices and ranges, date features, and pattern matching?
TypeScript 5.8 Beta Speeds Program Loads, Updates

"TypeScript 5.8 introduces a number of optimizations that can both improve the time to build up a program, and also to update a program based on a file change in either --watch mode or editor scenarios."