It may seem like a waste to have a whole post dedicated to a feature that isn’t there, but knowing this fact would have saved me some wasted mental effort and disappointment.
The Compact Framework is necessarily small. Microsoft only puts functionality into it that developers will be likely to actually need. This means that a lot of stuff you’d like to be there isn’t. This also means that you might need to interoperate with native code to do some of what you want to do.
If you are like me, this means you would like to use C++/CLI (the old-school .NET technology formerly known as Managed C++) to do that interop. You, like me, would be sorely disappointed. C++/CLI is not supported on the Compact Framework, and as far as I know there are no plans to add it. Prepare to P/Invoke.
As I’ve made my transition from the Microsoft desktop platform (x86, Windows, .NET, C#, etc.) to the world of handheld devices (ARM, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, .NET CF, etc.), there have been a number of fairly basic things that I’ve had to learn the hard way. They are so basic to being productive in the compact world that there ought to be a brief guide to bring an experienced desktop developer up to speed in short order. I didn’t come across that; so, I intend to provide that here for the next guy (or gal) who comes this way.
The sorts of things I plan (so far) to cover include topic like… What is CE and how does it relate to Windows Mobile? What is the memory model on CE? What are the memory limitations and strategies for working within and around them? What do you have to do to run your .NET code on the handheld device? How do you do unit testing with CF code? I’m also going to document a few potholes that initially slowed me down.