Serious local database support is probably one of the coolest new features of Windows Phone 7.1(5).

For the Windows Phone developer, it's not hard to create a local database, or add some columns, indexes or tables.

But if you're using a SQL CE database then you are, after all, developing for a phone. And one of phones' most exciting powers isn't their hard drives -- it's their cameras.

And it turns out that Mango makes storing camera photos -- or any image data for that matter -- pretty easy.

To see how easy, look at this HowTo from Anton Swanevelder, posted a few days ago on his blog.

Anton breaks SQL CE image-storage into three steps (the CRU in CRUD), and every step takes less than 20 lines. For example, you can create a column to store image data like this:

[Column]
public byte[] ItemImage
{
get { return _ItemImage; }
set
{
if (_ItemImage != value)
{
_ItemImage = value;
NotifyPropertyChanging("ItemImage");
NotifyPropertyChanged("ItemImage");
}
}
}

The other two steps are more interesting (converting a camera stream to a storable byte array, then converting the byte array to a bitmap markup-able in XAML), but no more difficult.

Read the full post for the full implementation.