My question is what kind of support does ES offer for synchronizing any changes made to the data once an internet connection is re-established?
You could do this with StrataFrame even prior to the ES. This is more of a disconnected data feature rather than an ES feature. For example, once you have data within the BO it can be modified and maintained and there is no "keep-alive" data session. The connection is re-established when a request to the DAL (Data access layer) is performed, such as a Save(), SELECT, etc.
The ES provides a way to communicate real-time from anywhere...fast! So in the case of pulling data down and then updating it later there are a number of options. The most common one would be to serialize the BO and save it to disk....once back in connection range (or in the office) then you can deserialize the BO and all of the unsaved content and call the Save just as you would any other time.
Does version 1.6 provide some mechanism to save to a local datastore while the smart client is disconnected from ES?
Use the serialization methods on the BO:
Serialize to local file on disk
Dim loFile As New System.IO.FileStream("c:\temp\MyBO.ser", System.IO.FileMode.Create)
MyBO.SerializeToStream(loFile)
Restore a saved BO from disk
loFile = New System.IO.FileStream("c:\temp\MyBO.ser", System.IO.FileMode.Open)
MyBO = CType(MicroFour.StrataFrame.Business.BusinessLayer.DeserializeBusinessObject(loFile), MyBO)