What was the most advanced stuff you did with compact framework

Question

At work I use mostly the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 for developing applications that run on smart devices. Our devices are not phones or handhelds - they are measurement instruments which you get with a whole punch of features. Our application is pretty advanced - we are even using a N-Layer architecture, a self-made GUI framework and even dependency injection (we built our own as the ones other there are not lightweight enough).

So what's the most advanced things you did with the compact framework?

What's currently missing (for example a mocking framework, as there is no Reflection.Emit on compact framework)?

How are you developing your applications? Are you deploying your application every time to the device. In our case this is very slow, as the solution consists of 30 projects so we have a Win32 Version which runs on the PC.

Answer 1

I wrote an app that monitors the statistics on my self-made blog by interfacing with a WebService.

Answer 2

We've done a plant-floor monitoring system that acts as a data server and a web server collecting data from PLCs and creating dynamic web-based reports all in the CF. We've created a peer-to-peer notification and file sharing system. We've done vehicle tracking and dispatching systems. We've done smart-farming applications that monitor loads of data from a tractor and couple that with location and previous year data, plus quite a few others. So I guess you could say de've written several highly-complex things using the CF.

There are lots of "missing" pieces, but most can be worked around. The most obvious missing piece that can't be worked around is the lack of EE Hosting. Reflection pieces for mocking would be nice, but we can live without - it just makes test more of a bear. The lack of Hosting makes several things simply impossible.

As for deployment, it's all about configuration. The Smart Device Framework itself, when coupled with all of the unit test stuff, is something like 45 projects. Deploying isn't bad as it only recompiled and deploys changes, and I often adjust the configuration of test applications to not deploy all projects, but only the main one. That should auto-deploy all references (eliminating the double-deploys you're probably getting). Also having all projects output to one common directory and setting "Copy Local" to false improves things quite a bit too.

Answer 3

I have developed a multi-language dictionary. Using one code base on Windows, PDA and via MONO on unix and MAC.

Basically the application is complicated because we use multiple databases that are large. We were able to tweak the data access performance and lookups on large tables are almost instantaenous.

Small devices are not very powerful, but if you design for the way they work you can get good performance out of them.

Answer 4

I made an app to collect measures of any magnitude (for weather), using an n tier app, with MVC and using db4o as a database... Pretty impresive

Answer 5

One of the most useful things we do with our .net cf application is work hard to make sure that they can be re-targeted to the full framework. This means you have a second desktop project or a unit test that actually runs your entire application on the desktop. There is a bit of work to do if you are using device specific functionality via pinvokes or device only APIs, but the effort usually pays off because:

• You can quickly run/debug your application without having to wait for an emulator or device to spin up
• You are forced to architect your code in a way that device specific functionality can be mocked and tested
• In many cases you are part way to having a desktop version of your application as well as the device version

It probably goes without saying that in the end, testing will need to be done specifically on the device, but during development and the quick code/debug cycles it is really nice to not wait on the emulator. I remember Daniel Moth posting something about how to actually create a device deployment target that is your desktop computer to achieve this same effect. Maybe someone else can find a link?