Synchronisation timeouts

Hi all,

I;m working on a project thats fully Silverlight. Garghhh. It uses the Silverlight offline function a large amount so our users can sync data offline to a local laptop for field visists.

I have concerns over all about the synchronisation method, more about that when I'm done fire fighting (this is an offshore development done in Vietnam...)

At the moment, if a user gets back on the network and starts a sync, then loses the network for a short time, they see no errors until a configurable timeout is hit. This is the exact answer from my developers...

"Mesage: An error occurred while trying to make a request to the server. This might be due to network problem or the server cannot handle the request”. This message appear because when you broke the network mid-Sync , the client can’t get server response feedback until WCF service is timeout, our configuration for WCF timeout is still 20 minutes so we have to wait for 20 minutes to get fail "

Whats the standard practise for monitoring connectivity during a sync like this? Surely something should be constantly pinging/polling the database server?

Thanks
Bob