Comment Re:Anyone used the .NET CF on WinCE.NET 4.1? (Score 1) 125
If you're used to programming for CE, the differences between the regular and compact frameworks are pretty similar to full-blown MFC and what is available on the CE SDKs. Basically, a lot of stuff is missing, some of it pretty important, but since the full version has about 6 ways to do something there is usually at least one that is supported on CE.
For some of the things that are missing (like COM interop) there are third party packages that give you the functionality back.
My biggest gripe is with Windows Forms - the namespace in the regular framework is pretty lacking as far as I'm concerned and once you start pulling out large chunks to make it 'Compact' you end up with your hands tied.
You end up with some pretty terrible kluges. For instance the 'Handle' property in the Control class is not supported, but you really need the underlying HWND a lot of the time for P/Invoke calls.
So what you do is P/Invoke 'SetCapture' and then 'GetCapture', which returns the HWND of the window capturing the mouse. This gets wrapped in a 'GetHandle' function so you're not constantly looking at how ugly your code is, but it sucks that you have to jump through such hoops to do pretty basic things.
And that's just the beginning...
For some of the things that are missing (like COM interop) there are third party packages that give you the functionality back.
My biggest gripe is with Windows Forms - the namespace in the regular framework is pretty lacking as far as I'm concerned and once you start pulling out large chunks to make it 'Compact' you end up with your hands tied.
You end up with some pretty terrible kluges. For instance the 'Handle' property in the Control class is not supported, but you really need the underlying HWND a lot of the time for P/Invoke calls.
So what you do is P/Invoke 'SetCapture' and then 'GetCapture', which returns the HWND of the window capturing the mouse. This gets wrapped in a 'GetHandle' function so you're not constantly looking at how ugly your code is, but it sucks that you have to jump through such hoops to do pretty basic things.
And that's just the beginning...
