Showing posts with label IsolatedStorage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IsolatedStorage. Show all posts

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Async support for Silverlight and WP7

Async support in C# language brings the new life to the modern application development to bring forth the same technique of writing your code and bring asynchrony easily. The main focus of async ctp is to ornament the language in such a way so that the developer could seamlessly create applications that brings asynchrony yet not dealing with its complexity. Hence using the new technique, asynchrony could easily achieved in a program without refactoring the whole program with lots of callbacks and method calls. I have already talked about it in a separate article. If you don’t know, please visit “Async CTP 5.0”.


Async CTP is released again recently and announced in MIX 11. Just after it is released, the first thing that everyone looks for is what is new in the release. As a matter of fact, I did jumped back to see them but eventually found out that there is nothing new in this build in terms of new features is concerned but the release focuses on fixes of performance adding debugging capabilities etc. I will definitely look back to them later in another post, but in this post I am going to talk about another important thing that featured with this release. As opposed to the previous release, the current release now supports Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 environments. This seems to be interesting.

What is Asynchrony?

The word asynchrony means something that is running without blocking other operations running in parallel. If you have created a background Thread to process some data, you are actually doing asynchronous job in background as your foreground operation does not get hampered. In vNext C# introduces Asynchrony using TPL. The two new keywords “async” and “await” could be used to make one sequential method asynchronous. Hence the new way of developing asynchronous program replaces the traditional approach where we needed to refactor the code totally to gain asynchrony in our application. Basically, this is done using the StateMachine to store the entire method into a form of states, and each states are delegated into batch of statements. The Task.ContinueWith is used in the system to ensure that the method body gets executed sequentially. Yes, it’s a compiler trick. If you want to know more about it, please read through my entire article on “Async CTP”.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Working with Isolated Storage for Windows Phone 7

During the last few days, Microsoft is getting more and more inclined towards improving the user experience in more than  a number of technologies. Silverlight being one of the major forerunner on this moving good in Web by providing Rich Internet Applications for end users. But not only for Web, Silverlight is a language being used for Windows Phone 7 as well, which gives the silverlight developers a chance to move over to Windows Phone easily. Being a WPF developer, I am totally freaked out on watching stuffs related to Windows Phone as richness in UI always attracts me. I have learned a few about Windows Phone 7 as well, but never got a chance to speak about it. Lets speak a little about the use of Isolated Storage (if you have already read my article here),  in Windows Phone 7 in this article.

Isolated Storage

We say Files and Folders are the building blocks for any application. We need to store data in our Phones to persist data when the application is not running. In case of Windows Phone 7 microsoft provides a secure way to store data into Isolated Store. Isolated Storage, as the name suggests is a special virtualized file system that every application can access for standard IO operations yet the file is unavailable to any other application. Hence the files stored by one application is isolated from another.

Each application has a root of the store of this Virtualized File system. You can use the store to create folders and files. The main advantage of the Isolated store is independence between the actual file system and the application. Hence it gives a strong decoupling between the actual physical architecture of the system and the application. To understand, lets see the image below  :



Here we have three applications running on Windows Phone, and each accesses its own root in the Virtualized file system for data storage. The application API cannot access the physical file system, but interacts with the Virtualized File system for its I/O operations. Thus if our physical file system changes, our stores will still be available and our application will run independently.

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