Not a lot of people know that #1: ESENT

Well actually, probably a lot of people *do* know about ESENT, but it was new to me today!

I found a link through to a .Net API for ESENT via a MSDN post this morning, and was curious as to what on earth ESENT actually is – and it turns out to be a rather interesting piece of Microsoft technology.

From the Wikipedia entry here:

The Extensible Storage Engine (ESE), also known as JET Blue, is an Indexed Sequential Access Method (ISAM) data storage technology from Microsoft. ESE is notably a core of Microsoft Exchange Server and Active Directory.

The MSDN entry goes in to more detail and links to the reference, and there’s a good introductory blog entry on the WindowsSDK blog. You have to wonder whether this might be a useful technology for offline enabling applications – so my next bit of research has to be whether Sync Services supports it.

Time to Google…

Microsoft ESE : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms684493(VS.85).aspx

Managed API for ESENT : http://www.codeplex.com/ManagedEsent