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.
