Discovering open source WPF components - Orc.Snapshots

In the discovering open source WPF components series, I will look into useful open source components that can be used to create WPF apps. This weeks component is Orc.Snapshots.

Snapshots are like save games. They represent a set of data and/or values from a specific moment in time in an application. Using snapshots allows an application (and thus eventually the end-user) to store data (in memory, in a file or any in other persistence tech) which can later be retrieved. The advantage of using this library is that it will zip all the data into a single snapshot package

Whenever a snapshot is created, the SnapshotManager will:

  1. Create a zip memory stream
  2. For each provider, it will ask the provider to fill up a memory stream which is stored as a separate file
  3. Persist the snapshot memory stream to the required persistence store

Below is an animated gif of the example app that is available in the component repository:

Snapshots in action

The library makes it super convenient to add custom data to a snapshot. Just create a provider and register it in the manager and you’re done. This way you can even store (multiple) files (representing a specific moment in time) in a snapshot. Then the users can restore the snapshots whenever they want to.

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