.NET Compact Framework Nears Release -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 10/22/2002
Last Visited: 10/22/2002
"We're almost out the door at this point," says product manager Ed Kaim.Though the company has not announced a date for the framework's launch, it may well take place at Microsoft's Embedded DevCon, opening this week in Las Vegas.
The .NET Compact Framework will make Visual Studio .NET the development environment for Pocket PC, Windows CE, and Microsoft Smartphone powered devices, replacing the eMbedded Visual Tools and specialized SDKs for the different platforms.It's Microsoft's hope that millions of Visual Basic developers will now join the world of mobile development."It's a familiar model, reaching down," Kaim says."I think that people are really starting to understand the value of having a fully extensible [development] environment."
Microsoft has gone to great pains to make development within the .NET Compact Framework indistinguishable from the desktop development process.The Visual Studio .NET designer, debugger, and editor are all unchanged."It can be kind of thankless sometimes when we put in months of man-hours and end up with something that's just on par," laughs Kaim."The only time we get hit on stuff, usually, is when something isn't the same."For instance, the beta versions of the framework were missing the DataGrid control familiar to desktop Visual Studio .NET developers; at the insistence of the users, that feature will be included in the final release.
One feature completely new to Visual Studio .NET is the Pocket PC and Windows CE emulator, which replicates the workings of a mobile device at the microchip level.The emulation is faithful enough to provide what Kaim somewhat ruefully calls "bug for bug" simulation: It managed to derail a demo application with something that turned out to be a device-level bug.
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Kaim also highlights the 2.0 release of SQL Server for CE as a key component of Microsoft's embedded strategy.Freely available for download, it's "one of the best-kept secrets out of the CE group," he says.
Information about the .NET Compact Framework will be posted to http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/device/ as it is released.
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