Enterprise Data Synchronization with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server Compact 3.5 by Rob Tiffany

This book is a must read for every developer who deals with storing data on Windows Mobile devices and who has the need to synchronize that data with a server. Realistically speaking, the majority of applications on Mobile Devices deal with some form of data synchronization. Tiffany starts by identifying some of the challenges and taking a look at one of the best occasionally connected applications (Microsoft Outlook) available on the market. The book focuses on Merge Replication, a Microsoft-supported technology to efficiently synchronize data between one or more servers and multiple clients. Tiffany starts by explaining the architecture of Merge Replication and he introduces a number of scenarios where Data Synchronization is essential.

In his book, Tiffany introduces a hypothetical company to explain all details about setting up a large distributed application. Each chapter in the book explains a particular subsystem. By making use of virtualization, it is possible for the reader to take Tiffany’s example, experiment with it and built upon it. In this way, this book gets you real hands-on information that is very valuable for your day-to-day work. Tiffany starts the example by talking about securing the data and limiting the amount of users that are allowed to share / synchronize data. After covering security and showing you hands-on examples, a realistic database is introduced that will be used throughout the remainder of the book. The next important step that is described in full detail is how to configure the server correctly to distribute data amongst clients. Throughout the explanation of properly configuring different subsystems, the author also gives a number of great performance tips that are for a large part based on his own experience working with large databases for enterprise organizations. Since Merge Replication makes use of IIS to actually sends data from servers to clients vv, Tiffany also discusses proper configuration of IIS intensively, again accompanied by numerous tips to get the best performance for your system. In the last chapters of the book, you will actually learn how to setup subscriber code in order to synchronize data with the client devices. The book really focuses on how to synchronize data between servers and clients, not so much on how to present data on client devices. This particular topic is covered in many other publications, both online and in print.

The approach, Tiffany takes for this book is efficient, pleasant to read, and allows you to learn to setup secure synchronization between a server database and a large number of clients, each caching data locally until they have a network connection to efficiently synchronize data back and forth. Thanks to the pleasant, to-the-point writing style and the step-by-step approach to setup Merge Replication, this book is very valuable to everybody who wants to synchronize data with mobile devices. After working through the entire book and re-creating all steps that Tiffany explains in the book, you should be able to efficiently and safely synchronize data between a server and a large number of clients yourself.

The title of this blog entry is perhaps a little misleading. Everybody who has developed Managed Applications for Windows Mobile Devices knows that it takes some time until the application is up and running. Amongst others, this is caused by the fact that the Common Language Runtime (CLR) needs to be initialized, assemblies need to be loaded and, in order to execute, quite a few methods need to be JIT’d. This simple managed application takes a little over a second to start.

A native application, written in C++, will start much faster. In fact, it only takes about 10% of the time to start a comparable simple managed application. So what if you would be able to combine the starting speed of a native application with the developer productivity of a managed application? This new article on DotNETForDevices explains how to use a Native Windows Mobile Application that programmatically starts a Managed Windows Mobile Application. The Native Application can for instance display a splash screen to the user while the Managed Application is starting in the background. The article not only explains this approach in detail, it also comes with a complete downloadable sample.