I’m looking for good options for persisting local state of an application (created in .Net / C#.)
I’ve considered rolling my own solution, or using a simple local database such as Sqllite, however I thought I’d ask the SO community what options are available.
The application I’m working on exists on a Kiosk, and I will need to maintain local state in case of accidental shutdown and other similar exceptions.
What do you recommend?
Update
Well, after further review I decided to use SQLite with DbLinq, the main alternative contender was SQL Server Compact edition, but there are several factors which I found important, which placed SQLite above SQLCE.
Notably.
- The API provided by SQLCE (IMO) wasn’t as rich as the ones provided by both SQLite.net or DbLinq.
- SQLCE runtime performance wasn’t as good as SQLite.
- SQLite being open-source is a useful factor.
Why I didn’t use Properties.Settings or app.config?
For my use case I needed something like a (easily) query-able event log (I need to allow auditing of credit transactions.) The primary state value I was addressing here was available credit on a kiosk. So to restore my state variables at application start up, I can query the log for the last entry and get the required values from there.
When you only need to store a value and retrieve it Properties.Settings or app.config are perfectly adequate places to do this.
SQLite is definitely a good option, it’s lighter than a full blown database, and it’s ACID compliant in case something goes terribly wrong.
The only requirement here is that you have one concurrent user for the database.