BrightstarDB provides support for a restricted set of platforms through the Windows Portable Class library. The set of platforms has been restricted to ensure that all of the supported platforms support the complete set of BrightstarDB features, including the Data Object Layer and the Entity Framework as well as the RDF Client API.
Note
If you are building an application for Windows Phone 7, it is still possible to use BrightstarDB as we have a specific port for that platform (see the section Developing For Windows Phone).
The BrightstarDB Portable Class Library is split into two parts; a core library and a platform-specific extension library for each supported platform. The extension library provides file-system access methods for the specific platform. In most cases both DLLs are required.
Note
At this time the BrightstarDB Portable Class Library is only included in pre-release versions of the BrightstarDB NuGet package.
If you are writing a Portable Library DLL, you need only include the BrightstarDB or BrightstarDBLibs package. Your DLL will have to target the same platforms that BrightstarDB supports (see above) or a sub-set of them.
If you are writing an application, you need to include either BrightstarDB or BrightstarDBLibs for the core library and then you must also add the BrightstarDB.Platform package which will install the correct extension library for your application platform.
The main portable class library build file is the file srcportableportable.sln. Building this solution file will build the Portable Class Library and all of the platform-specific extension libraries. You should then include the BrightstarDB.Portable.DLL and one of the following extension DLLs:
- BrightstarDB.Portable.Desktop.DLL for .NET 4.5 applications
- BrightstarDB.Portable.Phone.DLL for Windows Phone 8 applications
- BrightstarDB.Portable.Silverlight.DLL for Silverlight 5 applications
- BrightstarDB.Portable.Store.DLL for Windows store applications.
Alternatively you can include just the relevant project files in your application solution and build them as part of your application build.
There are some minor differences between the APIs provided by the Portable Class Library build and the other builds of BrightstarDB.
- The IBrightstarService.ExecuteTransaction and IBrightstarService.ExecuteUpdate methods do not support the optional waitForCompletion parameter. These methods will always return without waiting for completion of the transaction / update and you must write code to monitor the job until it completes.
- The configuration options detailed in :ref:<BrightstarDB_Configuration_Options> are not supported as there is no common interface for accessing application configuration information. Instead you can set the static properties exposed by the BrightstarDB.Configuration class at run-time (see the API documentation for details).
Due to the differences in storage model, the different platforms behave slightly differently in where they expect / allow BrightstarDB stores to be created and accessed from.
Paths to BrightstarDB stores are resolved relative to the applications working directory. It is possible to create / read stores in any file location accessible to the user that the application runs as.
All BrightstarDB stores are created in Isolated storage under the user-scoped storage for the application (the store returned by IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication()). Any path you specify for a store location will be resolved relative to this isolated storage root. It is not possible to create or access a BrightstarDB store under any other location.
For Windows Store applications paths are resolved relative to the user-scoped local storage folder for the application (the folder returned by ApplicationData.Current.LocalFolder). It is not possible to create or access a BrightstarDB store under any other location.
All builds of BrightstarDB use exactly the same binary format for their data files. This means that a BrightstarDB store created on any of the supported platforms can be successfully opened and even updated on any other platform as long as all of the files are copied retaining the original folder structure.