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

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