LINQ to SQL Platform Differences

Windows Phone supports most of the features of LINQ to SQL, apart from several notable absences present on other platforms and some additional features not seen in LINQ to SQL on other platforms. The following is a list of some of the most notable differences:

LINQ to SQL on Windows Phone does not directly support the execution of Transact-SQL, which includes Data Definition Language (DDL) and Data Modeling Language (DML) statements.

Local databases run in your app’s process and not in a background process, as is the case with most desktop-based databases.

A local database cannot be accessed by other apps; it lives in the sandboxed execution environment of your app.

Transactions are not directly supported.

For more detailed information on the various API differences, see http://bit.ly/xQMxmm.

New features have also been added to LINQ to SQL, specifically for Windows Phone apps. These include support for multiple table indexes and the ability to programmatically alter the database schema (described later in this chapter).