How to get started with Windows Phone database programming

Question

I am really new to Windows Phone ( and Windows) development, and C#.I have done my first program as a unit convertor for Window Phone 8.1 using C# and Silverlight, run it on emulator and Phone both.

Now I want to build an application that can store data (e.g. a diary, that I can store plain text in it daily), something like usage of database, but I really have no idea how to do it and whether I need some sort of database, like SQLite, or there is some built in solution to store custom data in Windows Phone itself.

Can you please tell me how to and where to start?

Answer 1

In Windows Phone Silverlight apps, you have the option of using a SQLCE database with the LINQ-to-SQL framework on top of it (see docs here). If you're considering building a universal app that will run on both Windows and Windows Phone, however, your only database option is SQLite (see here for more details).

That said - unless you need to perform queries across a large amount of structured data, a database is probably overkill for your app. You may want to consider simply using flat files (docs here) to start and only upgrading to a database if the amount of metadata for the diary entries grows beyond what you'd want to keep in memory.