Developing a winforms application for both a tablet PC and WindowMobile

Question

I'm developing an application for a Windows based tablet PC. This application is pretty much a port of an application I already developed on a Windows Mobile device using .NET CF. I want to write the application from scratch, taking advantage of all of the knowledge I've gained in software development.

I'd also like to write this new application in such a way that if I so desire, I can modify my existing Windows Mobile app to use the new libraries. Ideally, I'll have a shared set of business logic and data access libraries, with the only real difference being the UI layer - WPF for the tablet version, and just a standard CF interface for the Windows Mobile app.

Taking this into account, I'll need to make sure that all of the projects I create are compatible with the .NET Compact Framework. Is there an easy way to ensure this? One thought I had was to use a Smart Device Project for each class library that I create.

As well as this, is it easy for me to reference these libraries written for a .NET CF application from a standard windows application?

Is developing an application for a tablet PC the same as developing any normal windows forms application? Is there a different version of the .NET Framework to take into account, or are tablets pretty much standard windows pcs?

Answer 1

The tablets I've seen are running standard Windows with the "full" .NET, but I expect you can get some light-weight devices, too. One interesting possibility might be "client profile" (a subset of the regular "full" .NET dlls) - but I haven't seen much use of that myself.

CF and regular .NET share a lot of things, but ultimately there are differences; neither is a strict subset of the other. I've found that in general the only way to write code for 2 frameworks is to keep both active... for protobuf-net (which has this problem) I keep a project file for each framework so that I can quickly test that the build works everywhere (i.e. there are no missing methods etc).

You may find you need to use #if blocks to run slightly different code on the two frameworks, especially if you want to use "full" .NET features for performance reasons (that don't exist in the CF version). One way of making this easier it to hack the proj files to use recursive file inclusion:

<Compile Include="**\*.cs" />

Now you don't have to keep adding new files to both projects - it'll get picked up automatically (caveat: in the IDE you may need to unload/reload the project).

Answer 2

There isn't a special version of .NET Framework for Tablet PC. The question of sharing code between Windows Mobile and Windows has been asked before and the accepted answer is excellent.