The Moth

All of you know that Windows Mobile 5.0 was released in May at MEDC (Bill Gates keynote). Devices are expected to ship in Q4 this year.

From a general dotnet perspective, the most exciting thing about this platform release is that it exposes managed APIs! This is a first in both the mobile/embedded and desktop/server world. Maybe Longhorn will be the next, but for now WM 5.0 is the first and only one to do that.

What prompted me to share this is that already there are articles etc that refer to these APIs as being part of .NET Compact Framework v2.0 - they are not, they are part of the platfrom (which also includes CF 1.0 SP3 by the way). If you use netcf 2.0 to target a WM2003 or a WinCE 5.0 device, the APIs are not available. In contrast, if you use netcf v1.0 to target a WM 5.0 device then the APIs are available.

There is a lot of redundancy in my statements above but hopefully it will clarify the state of play (my fear is that this will become another common misconception similar to people talking about v1.1 of compact framework - when there is only v1.0 and v2.0).

The APIs I refer to are classes in the following namespaces:
Microsoft.WindowsMobile.PocketOutlook
Microsoft.WindowsMobile.Configuration
Microsoft.WindowsMobile.Status
Microsoft.WindowsMobile.Telephony
Microsoft.WindowsMobile.Forms

You can access them from Visual Studio 2005 once you download the WM 5.0 SDK and after you add reference to the relevant assemblies (same as namespace names with "dll" suffix)

Just to confuse things, there is a netcf 2.0 namespace with similar name: Microsoft.WindowsMobile.DirectX. If you are into game programming, check it out and also the article here

So, before I let you go back to your work, here is a link if you wish to find out more: recorded webcast & class diagram (the one missing is the Forms namespace which you can see here)

Oh, I almost forgot, if you like the new classes and would like to see them on earlier PPC versions (e.g. PPC 2003), check this out :-)