Using Isolated Storage to provide an offline mode of a module in an application

Question

I'm working on an application that allows users to submit some sort of requests. The application is broken down into several Silverlight applications one of which is that for submitting the requests. I'm thinking of maybe providing Out-of-browser support for the requests module, which can be run in offline mode. Accordingly, the user creates the request, saves it to the isolated storage and finally when the internet is back the requests are submitted to the SQL Server database.

So anyway, I have a few questions that will help me decide on what I should be doing exactly and proceed with a POC...

1. Would my main application be able to read from the isolated storage of that of the requests module?
2. Any feedback about http://siaqodb.com/? Do you suggest using this DB engine or should I stick to XML files?

Answer 1

1. Yes - access to isolated storage is scoped to the Silverlight application. So any code running in the same app (regardless of how many modules it's broken down into) accesses the same isolated storage. I believe an application is uniquely identified by the URL of the XAP file.

2. Interesting, but relying on 3rd-party solutions can be limiting - it would probably be faster and more flexible to just use XML.

Answer 2

You can use DataContractSerializer and isolated storage to save the data of the module to isolated storage, it'll encode it to xml without you having to use xml directly for it. The when in the constructor for the module you can reload the data class into the module quite easily.