One of the most useful new tools with the latest Windows Phone SDK is the Isolated Storage Explorer.

It is a command line tool used for downloading and uploading the contents of an application’s Isolated Storage folders to either the Emulator or a Device.

There are two times when this is invaluable.

The first is when you are deploying a new version and you do not want to lose the data. Since day one I have been annoyed with the frequency that that deployment mechanism decides to delete the application and reinstall it. By using this tool I never need to worry about that again as I can just save a snapshot, deploy, load the snapshot back in.

The second is when I find a bug with while using a retail copy of my app which I can not hook the debugger into. I can take a snapshot, load it into the emulator and debug.

To speed the process along I have created four windows .bat files that to perform each of the tasks I need.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.1\Tools\IsolatedStorageExplorerTool\ISETool.exe" ts de b8c6eab0-543c-4b55-be96-0b3da982df37 "C:\Users\chris_sainty\Desktop\IsoStore"

To use these yourself you will need to adjust the path if you are not on a 64bit system, and you will need to replace the GUID with the value from your WMAppManifest file.