Windows Phone 7 Isolated Storage Explorer
The explorer can work both as a desktop application for testers or integrated in Visual Studio for developers.
Whenever a WP7 application/project involves storing data locally the the device, it will be to the isolated storage file. A common difficulty is accessing the data for testing or rapidly restoring the application's data/state after the isolated storage has been reset, usually during the testing and development life-cycle.
One of the usual workarounds has been to add code to handle data transfers (to a WCF service or a remote Web Service) or just hard code test data, but this takes a lot of time and migrating the code from one project to another can take significant effort.
To help solve these issues and facilitate faster development for a WP7 application, the WP7 Isolated Storage Explorer includes the following features designed to make your life easier:
- Easy installer. One simple setup file that sets everything up on a development or testing machine.
- Easy integration. Add a single reference to your project and one line of code and you're done.
- Display the isolated storage file from multiple applications at the same time.
- Desktop client that handles all the common operations. The client handles operations such as bidirectional file transfer, creating folders, deleting files and folders and can perform parallel operations on multiple remote applications
- The same intuitive client integrated in Visual Studio. Developers can debug and check the data in the isolated storage file without leaving the IDE.
- Works in the background so your phone application will not be interrupted by operations. The explorer has been tested to handle invalid operations gracefully and to not interfere with the application's purpose.