How To: Windows Phone and SQL Databases

Once you start programming Windows Phone just after the first experiments, when you begin writing something of real, immediately you need something to store information locally. Also if the phone is a mobile device and it is almost always connected, there are information you cannot store remotely but you need to have always available. I'm speaking for sure about configuration settings but also about locally cached relational data that is required to run the application fast, without continuously access the network. In Windows Phone 7.0 the sole storage available was the Isolated Storage but it appear like a filesystem and it requires lot of code to serialize and deserialize entities. Some open source solutions has been created to work around this problem. I for sure remember Sterling, a real object oriented no-sql database that I used often to write my own applications. In the upcoming release of Windows Phone 7.1, Microsoft decided to add a Local Database implementation that is targeted to business applications and is created on top of SQL Server CE. This new feature completes the storage solutions available for the phone, supporting scenario where you need a real relational database and is really easy to configure and use. It does not totally override other solutions. Sterling remains a good solution for many scenarios, but having a real relational store is almost wonderful in many cases.