In episode number four of this series about how to develop a Windows Phone application from scratch we created the SettingsPage using a combination of Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2010. The SettingsPage has limited functionality, but it can modify a string that will eventually be displayed on the backside of a Secondary Tile. In this episode we will take a look at how to store data in IsolatedStorage.

If you watched the video of episode 4 you have noticed that the string containing the text to be eventually displayed on the Secondary Tile’s backside was not saved when the application was closed, because a default string showed up when the application was started again. In order to store the string so it will be available when the application starts again, we are going to store it into a specific part of the our IsolatedStorage. IsolatedStorage can be used to store files and system settings. It just acts as a hard drive with one little but important difference. IsolatedStorage is …. isolated. Everything that is stored in IsolatedStorage is exclusively available for the application that owns it, so other applications can not access it.

When a Windows Phone application starts, it will be running in the foreground, with its MainPage visible. As long as the user is working with the application, it remains n the foreground. An application can be terminated by the user by pressing the Back key on the phone until the last page of the application will be closed. An application can also be moved to the background. This happens when the user activates another application, or for instance when the user answers a phone call. On starting, a Launching event is raised. The App.xaml.cs file already has event handlers defined for the Launching and Closing events. These are the events that we are going to use to store / retrieve our string containing the backside text for our Secondary Tile.

NOTE: The sample code, retrieving and storing data in the Launching / Closing event works fine. However, all code executing upon firing those events has a time limit of 10 seconds. If an event handler takes longer to execute, the application will be immediately terminated. If you have much data to store / retrieve, you should take an alternative approach. You can for instance make use of a separate thread in those situations to retrieve / store information. To keep our sample lean and mean, we will directly retrieve / store data into IsolatedStorage from within the Launching / Closing event handlers.

Since all functionality is already available inside the SettingsPage to store the backside text of the Secondary Tile, we are only adding some functionality to the App.xaml.cs file. First thing to do is get access to the IsolatedStorageSettings for our application, which is in fact a dictionary in which values can be stored / retrieved through a key. The IsolatedStorageSettings are implemented as a singleton and are created the first time we try to access them. IsoloatedStorageSettings can be accessed from inside our entire application, although right now we will only use IsolatedStorageSettings inside the App.xaml.cs file.

In the code snippet you can see a declaration of a key (just a string variable) that is used to store / retrieve the string containing content for the back side of a Secondary Tile. You can also see how a private variable is declared that is initialized with the one and only instance of our application’s settings in IsolatedStorage.

Each time the application is started, the Application_Launching method will be executed. In this method we check if an object is stored under the key keyActSecBackContent. If this is not the case, we create a new entry in the dictionary of application settings and assign it with a default text that can be written to the back side of the Secondary Tile. If an entry already exists (which is basically always after creating one during the very first time), we retrieve the actual string from that entry. Since an application settings dictionary stores objects, we need to cast the actual value to a string.

When the application is terminated, the contents of the string that contains the text for the back side of the Secondary Tile might have been changed in the SettingsPage. That is the reason why we store that string always when the application ends.

It looks like we now have stored our application settings properly. However, that is not entirely the case, since our application might be temporarily interrupted because the user can start other applications without terminating our application. In those situations we have to take a look at the life cycle of an application. That will be topic of another episode of EvenTiles. It is also interesting to take a look at exactly what information is stored in IsolatedStorage. In order to do that, you can make use of the Isolated Storage Explorer Tool, a handy little tool that will be covered in episode six of EvenTiles.

In the following video you can see all the steps that you need to make application settings persistent and to retrieve them each time the application starts again.

Note: Every now and then I will make sure that you can download all source code that we created so far. I strongly recommend you to do so and to start experimenting with that code. After all, looking at real code, modifying it and understanding your modifications will hopefully help you to become a great Windows Phone developer fast.

If you want to keep up with the code of EvenTiles that is available until now, you can download it as a Zip file from this location. After downloading and unzipping it, you can open the EvenTiles solution in Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone. You must have the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 installed on your development system to do so. If you have a developer unlocked phone you can deploy the application to your phone, if you don’t have a developer unlocked phone you can still experiment with this application inside the emulator.