posted on Thursday, December 16, 2004 1:53 AM
by
kevdaly
Command line compilation in .NETCF v2.0
Following a post on Jono's blog pointing to Visual Studio 2005 beta documentation on new features in .NETCF v2.0 (and another from Peter Foot pointing to the first, which acted as a reminder to check it out), I went and had a look around (as one does).
One thing I was pleased to see is that MS appear to have made good on a promise (well, assurance I suppose) made in the early days of the Compact Framework that they would eventually provide support for the .NETCF in the SDK.
You can find the details (along with a handy batch file example that seems to have (quote?) encoding issues) here.
Some of you will be thinking "Goody, now I can create automated batch builds of my Enterprise .NETCF applications! The Senior Vice President In Charge of Junior Vice Presidents in Charge of Asking People To Make Coffee will be impressed!".
Yeah, whatever.
To me the great significance of this is that it helps to keep the base of Windows Mobile developers broad and lowers a significant barrier to entry, since there are many talented developers out there who will not be able to afford Visual Studio 2005 Professional (and can't currently afford VS .NET 2003 Professional) - the sort of people for whom the old Embedded Visual Tools hit the ideal price point.
I don't want to read to much into prerelease documentation (which I may be doing already), but I also find the following statement encouraging:
“The executable file, which can be copied to the device or emulator, will be built in the current directory“
...which suggests at least the possibility that the emulator will be included in the SDK (admittedly they could just be referring to a batch build scenario for people who have Visual Studio).
Still, if the release version of the SDK includes debugger support for .NETCF (it doesn't at the moment), there are some very interesting possibilities for third parties (that's you and me, folks) to have some fun writing (or trying to) IDEs in the latter part of next year (or earlier with the betas of course if we have any sense).