Isolated Storage

03
Jul
2011

Isolated Storage and Multithreading

The documentation is a little weak on thread safety when it comes to Isolated Storage, with just a little message on the subject: “Any public static (Shared in Visual Basic) members of this type are thread safe. Any instance members are not guaranteed to be thread safe.”.

What I’ve found is this: Reading files from Isolated Storage is fine from multiple threads at the same time – obviously if a thread is saving the file then things are a little murkier.

However, writing files is not thread safe. Do not attempt to write two different files at the same time to Isolated Storage, you’ll get an exception sooner or later.

My fix is a little messy, I have a global lock object I use whenever I want to write to Isolated Storage; this means I can only ever save one file at a time.

Posted by Dan in Windows Phone, 0 comments
29
May
2011

Isolated Storage Settings In WP7

Recently I had a problem with Isolated Storage Settings on WP7 – the entire collection appeared to be wiped every single time I restarted the app. The problem turned out to be the deserialization stage of IsolatedStorageSettings, in essence if any object can’t be re-instantiated, then the entire collection is inaccessible. The collection will work correctly until you attempt to retrieve something that can’t be instantiated.

At the bare minimum the constructor of your class must be public.

All non-public properties will also fail to be restored, resulting in a rather empty object instance when you come to load the values that should have been saved (and have been… they just don’t come back). Be very careful with this issue, you may not notice the problem until it’s too late.

Posted by Dan in C#, Windows Phone, 1 comment