My company is building an occasionally connected app, and we're thinking about using the Microsoft Sync Framework.
From what I can tell, though, clients are required to connect directly to the database server in order to sync. This sounds like a security hole. I could use a VPN to connect to the server, I guess, but my database is on EC2, and we've wasted lots of effort trying to get a VPN solution work on EC2 to no avail. I've read plenty of other tales, confirming that software VPNs on Windows/EC2 don't work.
Any suggestions on how to architect this Occasionally Connected App?
Clients do not need to connect directly to the database. It's very easy to sync over a WCF service using wsHttp or netTcp bindings.
See the tag Faq here: https://stackoverflow.com/tags/microsoft-sync-framework/info