Revisiting .NET CF Whinges

18 months ago, I wrote an article called “.NET CF whinging”. Now that Compact Framework 2.0 has been released, what’s been fixed?

• I complained that only DrawLine was available, not DrawLines (which maps better to the underlying Polyline call). In .NET CF 2.0, you can now use DrawLines.
• Previously, you could only create a one-pixel-wide pen. Now you can create pens of any width.
• The System.Diagnostics.Process class has been added.
• WaitHandle.WaitOne now offers a timeout overload. WaitAny is still missing.
• Thread.Abort and Thread.Join are now present.
• Control.InvokeRequired makes an appearance, and the Control.Invoke overload that takes an array of object parameters to pass to the delegate is now present. However, the documentation still contains a note that for .NET Compact Framework, you must use the EventHandler delegate, which only offers an empty EventArgs. This appears to be a documentation error – passing other delegate types and parameters does now work! The new BackgroundWorker class of the desktop Framework is not offered.

Rumour has it that the marshalling’s better in this version too.