SQLite and .Net

One part of Inbox that I detest is the back-end storage model it uses to keep track of posts and their states (read state, flag state, current folder).  It basically keeps this information in memory then serializes it out into XML files when you shutdown Outlook.  It wasn't my decision to write Inbox this way, but I have kept this code and added to it considerably over the years.

One reason I kept it is that I didn't want to deal with installing a database along with an Outlook add-in.  Seemed like overkill really.  But that was before I played around with SQLite.

SQLite along with System.Data.SQLite make it ridiculously easy to install a back end database with full SQL support.  How easy?  Include the System.Data.SQLite, then create a connection:

SQLiteConnection sqliteConn =
   new SQLiteConnection("Data Source=MyDb.db3;Pooling=true;FailIfMissing=false");

That's it.  Database created, ADO object ready, now just populate it.  I used SQLite Administrator to create my database schema, then just exported the SQL script to execute in my actual program.

So far so good.  Hopefully this works out.  Even though users won't *see* a difference they should notice an improvement in performance.  And my code will be drastically simpler which is always good... that is if everything works out and I can get everything ported!