The Moth

We looked last time at the VS.NET 2003 support for Smart Device Projects from an intellisense perspective.

VS2005 seems to be miles ahead in that department (as well). In fact, I have yet to find a PME (property, method, event) that compiles while it is not supported _or_ a PME that is supported at runtime and not offered in the IDE :-)

The story is even more interesting. Let's take a control, e.g. TreeView. If you try to add an event handler in code, intellisense lists only the events that are applicable. Now, since TreeView inherits from Control, I know I should be able to add an event handler to an event that is exposed by Control such as DoubleClick or Paint. So, even though intellisense doesn't help me, I can type:
treeView1.DoubleClick += new EventHandler(treeView1_DoubleClick);

Here is the new feature. This does not result in a compilation error but rather a warning in the "error list" window:
"Members not supported by the Device platform should not be called: System.Windows.Forms.TreeView.add_DoubleClick is not a supported method in this platform".
I like this! If I have explicitly written code that intellisense doesn't recognise I must have my reasons, so don't error out on me - just warn me. E.g. if code is shared between desktop and CE devices, you may avoid the conditional compilation and just not offer the functionality on the CE device. (this does make me think of a feature request to turn every compilation error into a warning, but I'll resist going down that thinking path...)

Needless to say that if you try something like adding an event handler to TreeView.NodeMouseClick event, which is supported in .NET 2.0 but not NETCF 2.0, you do get a compilation error; the warning in the previous case is only because the event is inherited from Control.