Overview

The Microsoft .NET Compact Framework (.NET CF) is a version of the .NET Framework that is designed to run on Windows CE-based mobile/embedded devices such as PDAs, mobile phones, factory controllers, set-top boxes, etc. The .NET Compact Framework uses some of the same class libraries as the full .NET Framework and also a few libraries designed specifically for mobile devices, such as Windows CE InputPanel.

Paul Yao and David Durant offer the authoritative reference (updated to CF 3.5 shipping with VS2008) tailored to meet the complete needs of programmers, including LINQ and ASP.NET Ajax. Key features of this second edition "work-in-progress" include: 

• Insight: Where other books provide a laundry list of system features and a re-hashing of the documentation, this book discusses the internal architecture of both the operating system (Windows CE) as well as of the managed code library, the .NET Compact Framework.

• Authoritative information: The authors have very close ties to Microsoft, due to their long-standing relationships with key players inside Microsoft.

• Depth: A key connection point between the operating system and the Compact Framework is Platform Invoke (P/Invoke). This book provides extensive discussion of how this technology works, as well as code examples that provide insights into developing code for the trickier aspects of this technology.

• Reference to Control PMEs: PME stands for "Properties, Methods, and Events," and these make up the core connection points to a user-interface control. The authors found early on that there was no good way to know which ones are actually supported for a given control. They built a tool (freely distributed) to figure out this problem, and use that tool as the basis for their chapters on user-interface control programming.