TamsPPC - the PocketPC Blog

Books on the .NET Compact Framework are very hard to find. Addison Wesley’s classic “Building solutions with the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework” has been on the market for ages and was considered a standard work by many when it came out 2004. Is it still worth reading in the age of .NET CF 2.x?

The book starts out with a broad look at the enterprise device landscape, the development options and at the various flavors of Windows CE. It also gives an overview of what the .NET CF can do well and what it can’t - people who have not programmed for the .NET CF before will definitely benefit a lot from this.

The second part looks at an enterprise application’s “architecture” - that is, at data storage and synchronization. Multiple chapters are dedicated to each of the fields, each one of them presents every possible concept in considerable detail(with a nice bit of sample code). I especially enjoyed the chapters on data synchronization related to the SQL Server CE - knowing this has saved me literally hundreds of man hours on a project that I currently pursue.

Part 3 is a “smorgasboard” of various interesting items. Fox&Box introduce you to things like localization, application deployment and security - topics that are very important in everyday life, but are very hard to get a grip on without proper documentation.

The book is very well written and easily understandable for anyone with a bit of Visual Basic experience. Graphics and tables like the one below help you when it comes to understanding complex problems:

In the end, the ever-famous Fox&Box book IMHO is a tome that belongs into each and every .NET CF coder’s claws. While it does not contain hundreds of step-by-step recipes(or a thorough introduction into Windows Mobile); it gives you a quick overview of the development landscape. This will come in handy when looking for actual sample code - and helps you avoid unnecessary duplication of code already contained in the framework. The price of 40$ at Amazon’s is a bit steep(seeing that small parts of the book are outdated), but still justified…

Microsoft’s ‘in-house’ languages(Visual Basic, C#,…) have undergone significant changes with each release of the Visual Studio IDE. The VB found in Visual Studio 2005 was completely different to the one I knew from my VB6 days…can O’Reilly’s Developer’s Notebook get me updated?

Matthew MacDonald starts off by looking at the IDE itself - what changed, and more importantly, what’s in it for me. Many of the hints given herein can be significant time-savers(e.g. the automatic documentation generation). After that, the book goes on to look at various new aspects of the Visual Basic language. VB6 coders like me will find great value in these chapters; as they omit what you already know.

Two chapters on Windows and Web applications follow. These are written in a ‘cook book’ style - if you need what’s described, read it and party. If not, reading the code anyways shows you interesting facets of VB2005(for example, did you know about the IsNot operator?).

A chapter on all kinds of data-related tasks is included - its style follows the chapters before it. Last but not least, a chapter on the .NET framework looks at interesting ‘miscellanea’ like code performance timing and deployment - while I still miss a recipe on the insanely tedious process of creating an installer for a .NET CF application; it made a great read nevertheless.

O’Reilly books traditionally are well-written and easy to read; I am happy to say that this one makes no difference. The paper used is of good quality, too…the unusual page design helps a lot when making notes:

In the end, Matthew MacDonald’s book makes a great ‘hint book’ showing a lot of cool ‘gems’ that a developer could otherwise miss easily. While it cannot replace a structured introduction to VB; the hints contained can be worth their price in gold. If you have 22$ spare, add the book to your next Amazon order!