You've heard plenty about the Sterling database engine on this blog. I recently released version 1.5 which extended the reach of the database and added several feature requests. My article on Sterling for Isolated Storage on Windows Phone 7 was also recently published in MSDN Magazine. The phone has made this a very popular engine and it has been ...

I was at the MIX 2011 event. There was an ''Open Source Fest'' before the event and I came to showcase the Sterling NoSQL Database project that I run (and code most of, although there have been numerous enhancements and patches now added by a growing team of fantastic supporters). I was happy to speak to several people who hadn't heard of the ...

While the Sterling NoSQL database supports many items out of the box, there are certain item types it just doesn't know enough about. For example, consider a property defined as IEnumerable. Unlike a list, an enumerable is not bounded. It simply exposes an iterator, and for all we know, that iterator might be an enumerable method that produces ...

Today I decided to work on some miscellaneous performance optimization tasks for my Sterling NoSQL Database that runs on both Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. The database will serialize any class to any level of depth without you having use to attributes or derive from other classes, and despite doing this and tracking both keys and relationships ...

I'm exploring the phone more and more and came across the case of allowing the user to enter digits. One thing to keep in mind on the phone is that the form factor requires approaches to input that are different from the traditional desktop. A desktop application might handle numeric entry by simply filtering the text box, but that assumes a ...

Codestock is an amazing event that I first attended last year in Knoxville, Tennessee. It's hosted at a great venue in a wonderful city and loaded with exciting sessions. I had just as much fun speaking at my session as I did attending the other sessions and learning about new technologies. I've submitted two talks this year and if you are ...

Yesterday I wrote about an ultra light Windows Phone 7 MVVM Framework and mentioned that I would deal with tombstoning in a later post. This is the post. Sterling makes tombstoning very easy because it handles serialization of just about any type of object. To show an example, we'll start with the concept of a view model that holds a set of ...

In early 2010 I was working on several Silverlight projects that were driven by the need to provide a working offline solution. Isolated storage was the obvious answer. Unfortunately, serializing 10,000 contacts came with some overhead and I realized quickly that I was following some similar patterns when it came to handling large sets of data: I ...

Sterling changeset 72063 [browse the source code here] introduces triggers. The trigger is a powerful feature that allows you to universally intercept database operations. Their application in Sterling resolves several concerns, including: Validation — prevent a save operation from succeeding if data integrity is compromised, or prevent a ...

Sterling is an object-oriented database that I created to facilitate ease of serialization of data in both Silverlight 4 (soon 5) and Windows Phone 7 projects. Sterling was designed with a few goals in mind. It is not a true relational database and not intended to replace one. I'm confident certain offerings such as SQLite or even a trimmed down ...