HowTo: Store and Retrieve Images in a SQL CE Database on Windows Phone Mango

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.