Issues Installing Windows Phone IsoStoreSpy on Windows 8

Windows Phone IsoStoreSpy is a great utility for interrogating the Windows Phone Iso Store when developing applications. It usually if you want to check to see if files are being created correctly, and identifying what is in a file on the phone’s local store. IsoStoreSpy can pier into both the emulator and physical device. It also provides some other functionality like being able to create ringtones, but I haven’t used that.

I had a brand new install of Windows 8 with Visual Studio 2012, and not a lot of old components installed. This was a fresh install, so the most recent versions of most things were already installed. When I tried to install IsoStoreSpy with the ClickOnce installation, it error’d out indicating that version 3.5 of System.Data.SqlCE needed to be installed in the GAC. For some reason it wasn’t, although I would’ve assumed that Visual Studio would’ve had that in there (I believe VS actually installs 4.0).

In order to even install the application, you need this component installed. I did a little search and found that you can install SQL Compact Edition 3.5 SP1 with a standard MSI for both x86 and x64 versions. You can download those here.

Once I installed that, I was then able to get the ClickOnce installation going and completing successfully.