All about WP7 Isolated Storage - Open Source Databases and Helper Libraries

published on: 7/12/2011 | Views: N/A | Tags: IsoStore

by WindowsPhoneGeek

This is the last article from the "All about WP7 Isolated Storage " series of short articles focused on real, practical examples with source code rather than plain theory. This time I am going to talk about Open Source Databases and Helper Libraries related to Isolated Storage in Windows Phone 7.

• All about WP7 Isolated Storage - intro to Isolated Storage
• All about WP7 Isolated Storage - Creating Folders and files
• All about WP7 Isolated Storage - Store data in IsolatedStorageSettings
• All about WP7 Isolated Storage - Read and Save Text files
• All about WP7 Isolated Storage - Read and Save XML files using XmlSerializer
• All about WP7 Isolated Storage - Read and Save XML files using XmlWriter
• All about WP7 Isolated Storage - Read and Save Images
• All about WP7 Isolated Storage - Read and Save Captured Image
• All about WP7 Isolated Storage - Read and Save Binary files
• All about WP7 Isolated Storage - File manipulations
• All about WP7 Isolated Storage - Recommendations and Best Practices
• All about WP7 Isolated Storage - Open Source Databases and Helper Libraries

Generally  speaking there are lots of Open Source projects and helper libraries related to database and Windows Phone 7 Isolated Storage. However  we can not use all of them, that is why I decided to mention only the top three tools we would suggest every windows phone developer should be familiar with.

• Windows Phone 7 Isolated Storage Explorer

http://wp7explorer.codeplex.com/

Project Description
WP7 Isolated Storage Explorer is a FREE open source tool designed to help developers and testers interact with the isolated storage file system for Windows Phone 7 applications. Whenever a WP7 application/project involves storing data locally on the device, it will be to the isolated storage file system. A common difficulty is accessing the data for testing or rapidly restoring the application's data/state after the isolated storage has been reset, usually during the testing and development cycle.

One of the usual workarounds has been to add code to handle data transfers (to a WCF service or a remote Web Service) or just hard code test data, but this takes a lot of time and migrating the code from one project to another can take significant effort. WP7 Isolated Storage Explorer helps solving these issues and facilitates faster development of WP7 applications.

• Windows Phone 7 database

http://winphone7db.codeplex.com/

Project Description
This project implements a Isolated Storage (IsolatedStorage) based database for Windows Phone 7. The database consists of table object, each one supporting any number of columns. Use this as persistence engine for Windows Phone 7 Silverlight (and XNA) applications.

• Sterling NoSQL OODB for .NET 4.0, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7

Project Description

Sterling is a lightweight NoSQL object-oriented database for .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4 and 5, and Windows Phone 7 that works with your existing class structures. Sterling supports full LINQ to Object queries over keys and indexes for fast retrieval of information from large data sets.
The goal behind Sterling is to keep it:

• Non-intrusive. You shouldn't have to change your classes just to persist them. (No awkward mapping from a class model to a relational database model).
• Lightweight. As of this writing, the DLL for Sterling is under 85 KB. No one needs to bloat their project for something as simple as persisting data.
• Flexible. While the core is light, Sterling is designed to handle any serialization task and make it ultra-easy to query databases using LINQ-to-Objects.
• Portable. Sterling runs equally well on the desktop/server .NET framework, Silverlight, and Windows Phone.

View the full Features list. Jeremy Likness has lots of post about Sterling in his blog http://csharperimage.jeremylikness.com/

• Windows Phone Mango

With the Windows Phone 7.1 Mango update, you can now store relational data in a Local Database, stored in your application's Isolated Storage. In Windows Phone all applications are "isolated" from each other, which means that one application can access only its own Isolated Storage. I.e one database can be used only from one application and cannot be shared between several applications. Here are some of our articles related to the subject:

• Windows Phone Mango Local Database(SQL CE): Introduction
• Windows Phone Mango Local Database(SQL CE): Linq to SQL
• Windows Phone Mango Local Database: mapping and database operations
• Using SqlMetal to generate Windows Phone Mango Local Database classes
• Performance Best Practices: Windows Phone Mango Local Database

That was the last post from the "All about WP7 Isolated Storage" series of 12 posts. I hope you enjoyed it. Stay tuned for more content on www.windowsphonegeek.com .

You can also follow us on Twitter @winphonegeek

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