Isolated storage location for windows phone 7?

Question

I'm building a windows phone 7 application using silverlight 4. I store my data in Isolated storage as outlined here. The program runs with no errors. My question is where I can see the file I have saved? Is it possible to find the file in the windows phone 7 emulator?

Answer 1

The "Mango" SDK ships with the ISETool that can take and restore snapshots of an application's isolated storage to/from a local directory:

# Copy data from IS to directory
ISETool.exe ts xd <PRODUCT-ID> "C:\TempDirectory\IsolatedStore"

# Copy data from IS to directory
ISETool.exe rs xd <PRODUCT-ID> "C:\TempDirectory\IsolatedStore"

Answer 2

After some more googling, i found this post. It seems that "the emulator does not save its state when you close it." Also:

Saving State. To test compatibility with other .Net framework environments I just re-implemented some standard Isolated Storage example code for application settings in my Silverlight application. It just works. But note, the preview emulator doesn’t hold state beyond debug sessions – so you can only test state storage in your application session at the moment.

from this post. (http://wotudo.net/blogs/wotudo/archive/2010/03/15/mix-building-a-windows-phone-7-series-silverlight-application.aspx)

Answer 3

The intent of isolated storage is for it to be only accessible by the application that wrote the data in that store. Isolated storage can not be shared across applications, hence being able to find the files you store in isolated storage through an explorer like experience isn't allowed.

If you need to access the files to observe the data in it, or to share it across applications, consider storing the file in a cloud service. Or if you need to look at the contents of that file for debug purposes, maybe add an option to write that file on your server.