Here is your chance to get in on a .NET Compact Framework beta:

The Microsoft^® .NET Compact Framework Product Team would like to invite you to participate in their upcoming beta program for .NET Compact Framework 1.0 SP2. We are specifically looking for feedback as to whether existing application functionality is preserved when running against SP2 bits (no regressions).

Our goal is to have a well targeted group of testers willing to actively participate and provide useful feedback to our development team. Please carefully consider your willingness and ability to test .NET Compact Framework 1.0 SP2. Your feedback will be critical to the success of our product. Regular and consistent participation throughout the program is expected.

If you are selected as a technical beta tester, you may be required to: 

• Download releases through BetaPlace, an authenticated Web site
• Participate in private beta newsgroups
• Submit bug reports online
• Complete periodic surveys hosted on BetaPlace to obtain your input on various technical issues

If you are interested in participating, please use this special Guest Account below to access a nomination survey on http://www.BetaPlace.com.

Guest Access Account
Guest Beta ID: netcfbeta

You will only be contacted once your nomination has been processed.  We look forward to hearing from you.
The .NET Compact Framework Team

Thursday, November 06, 2003 7:57:36 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

We have been doing quite a bit of Compact Framework development as of late and the lack of a configuration class was driving us nuts.  So here is an implementation of a configuration class that you can use and play with.  Please post any issues you find to the comments here.  Let me know if you think this is worthy of starting a GotDotNet workspace around.

VergentSoftware.CompactFramework.Utilities.Setup.msi (119 KB)

VergentSoftware.CompactFramework.Utilities.Setup.Source.msi (95 KB)

Enjoy!

Sunday, November 02, 2003 10:54:28 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Shawn Burke showed up a bit late but proceeded to give a number of great tips/tricks for improving windows forms performance.

One tip that I found fairly interesting was to use premultiplied bitmaps when doing drawing.  To do this you load your image, then create a new image using 32bppPArgb  for the format.  Draw your image into this image using the Graphics class, dispose of the original image and then use the new image from them on for an approximately 6x increase in drawing performance!  Very, very cool.

Wednesday, October 29, 2003 1:10:11 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

ClickOnce Deployment has finally been shown to the masses so I can talk about it.  I am quite excited about click once since it alleviates a number of the problems we have experienced with HREF-exe type applications in 1.1.

Click Once is a feature integrated into VS.NET that will take your executable, package it up, deploy it to a web server, and give you a test page like the current ASMX model.

You can make packages for online or online/offline applications.  Online applications don't change any system state so they will be run without any prompting but be very limited in what they can do at install time.  They must be capable of being rolled back.  Online/offline applications can do things like add things to the start menu, etc. but as a result the user is prompted if they want to install the application.

Privilege elevation is handled by prompting the user to allow privileges to be elevated.  There are several administrative things that admins can do to prevent users from elevating privileges or to sign an application so it gets it's privileges elevated automatically based on a one time deployment of the root key used to sign the application.

There is also an object model that allows your application to query if a new version is available and if it is download it in the background and use it on next startup.

The longhorn version will support BITS.

All in all very, very cool stuff!

Wednesday, October 29, 2003 8:20:45 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

I finally made it to the PDC!  Took a side trip through Portland but made it here around noon.  Missed the keynote but picked up the Avalon overview.  In a word, wow!  If you have been envious of OSX as a windows user this is for you.  The stuff they are doing is amazing and goes beyond what I have seen in Jaguar.  Cool stuff.

Monday, October 27, 2003 4:50:59 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Well I did it!  I went ahead and switched to dasBlog.  Radio finally drove me to the brink and I needed some new software in time for the PDC.  I must admit I really wished it supported hosting multiple blogs in a more flexible fashion but it is pretty amazing how easy the transfer was from Radio.  I looked at .Text but most folks I know are running dasBlog and they claimed the Radio transition was fairly painless.  More posts coming next week from the PDC...

Saturday, October 25, 2003 11:38:52 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

More Compact Framework Thoughts

Wow!  Two posts in one day.  Considering the dearth of posts from this blog lately that is pretty amazing. After my earlier rant I remember something I brought up with the CF team at Microsoft.

When I have heard the limitations of CF described in the past by MS folks it has been in the context of, "We are running on smaller, memory constrained devices so we built a smaller version of the framework that fits in just 2 MB."  That is all well and good but I am starting to do work for Windows CE based devices with 128MB and 256MB and I really want the full power of the framework.  While it is impressive that they were able to compress the amount of goodness that they did into 2 MB but what about developers for which there is abundant memory available?  Why didn't the team take more of a factored approach such that if I was willing to give them another 2MB I could get remoting or <insert your favorite dropped feature here>?

This really brings to life the promise of only needing to know how to develop for one platform, .NET.  I don't need to know a long laundry list of limitations of things that I can't do on WindowsCE.  Instead I have to be willing to step up and trade RAM for features.  I know, I know not all features will be available on WindowsCE because of limitations of the OS.  I am fine with that.  The list of things removed due to OS limitations is going to be much shorter than the current list of things that were removed.  IOW the delta between desktop and compact will narrow but not necessarily close the gap.

Wednesday, September 24, 2003 2:26:51 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]