SQLite Portable Class Library, or My First Timid Steps into Open Source

In this short post I want to tell you how I took my first timid step into the world of open source.

It all started when, getting ready for the release of Windows Phone 8.1, I was merging the code of my reader for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 and adapting it to Windows Phone 8.1. Along the way I wanted to figure out what a Portable Class Library is and how to use it.

During the migration I ran into a problem with the library for working with SQLite. This database engine is supported on all the platforms, but it ships as a native library for each platform. On top of that, to work with the library I had to use the NuGet package sqlite-net. This package contains 2 source files that can be compiled for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.

Earlier, when I had 2 separate projects, this suited me fine. The files were included in each project and compiled for the target platform. But now that I had decided to merge the projects, it became a problem. I needed a single library that could be referenced from both a Windows 8 and a Windows Phone 8 build.

The solution was the SQLitePortable library. Its source code is freely available under the MS-PL license.

For convenience, there is also a NuGet package, SQLitePortable.

Enjoy, I'm happy to share :)