Using isolated storage for application-specific data in C# .NET Part 1: the basics

There’s a special storage location for a .NET application on Windows that is allocated to that application. It’s called isolated storage and it’s an optimal place to store files by an application that doesn’t have full access to the file system. Writing to and reading from isolated storage doesn’t require any extra security check. An application without full access to the file system will be able to use its allocated slot in isolated storage and nothing else. It’s an ideal mechanism for storing e.g. application state.

However, don’t confuse isolated storage with file security. It is still a “normal” location on disk with a file path. A typical location is under users/[username]/appdata/local. Therefore you or full-trust applications can still find and modify the files saved in isolated storage. However, limited-trust applications won’t be able to access any other part of the file system.

The two key objects into isolated storage are IsolatedStorageFile and IsolatedStorageFileStream. Let’s see how a custom AppSettings object can be saved for a user in isolated storage:

private static void SaveSettingsInIsoStorage()
{
	IsolatedStorageFile applicationStorageFileForUser = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForAssembly();
	IsolatedStorageFileStream applicationStorageStreamForUser = new IsolatedStorageFileStream("settings.txt", FileMode.Create, applicationStorageFileForUser);
	AppSettings settings = new AppSettings()
	{
		Job = "Programmer",
		Language = "C#",
		Name = "Andras"
	};
	string contents = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(settings);

	using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(applicationStorageStreamForUser))
	{
		sw.WriteLine(contents);
	}
}

…where AppSettings looks like this:

public class AppSettings
{
	public string Language { get; set; }
	public string Name { get; set; }
	public string Job { get; set; }
}

We simply save the settings object as a JSON string in the assembly-specific section of the isolated storage at the user level. We can also store machine-wide settings for an application using the GetMachineStoreForAssembly method instead.

Reading from isolated is equally easy:

private static void ReadSettingsFromIsoStorage()
{
	IsolatedStorageFile applicationStorageFileForUser = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForAssembly();
	IsolatedStorageFileStream applicationStorageStreamForUser = new IsolatedStorageFileStream("settings.txt", FileMode.Open, applicationStorageFileForUser);
	using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(applicationStorageStreamForUser))
	{
		string raw = sr.ReadLine();
		Debug.WriteLine(raw);
	}
}

Here’s the output:

{“Language”:”C#”,”Name”:”Andras”,”Job”:”Programmer”}

Read the next part here.

Read all posts dedicated to file I/O here.