Write Code Once For Both Mobile And Desktop Apps

Differences in the tools, the languages, the libraries, and the runtime engine affect the goal of writing cross-platform code.

The .NET Compact Framework achieves 80 percent of the relevant functionality found in the .NET Framework with only 20 percent of the footprint. Major areas of the .NET Framework that are absent from the compact version include: ASP.NET, CLR hosting, code access security (CAS), binary serialization, Reflection.Emit, and CodeDOM. Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation are not going to be supported any time soon.

System.Data.SqlServerCe, System.Net.IrDA, Microsoft.WindowsMobile.DirectX and Microsoft.WindowsCE.Forms are four device-specific assemblies that are in the .NET Compact Framework and not in the the .NET Framework. So the .NET Compact Framework is not a strict subset of the .NET Framework.

IL opcodes that are not supported by the .NET Compact Framework common are: jmp, calli, refanyval, refanytype, mkrefany, arglist, localloc, unaligned, and tail.

The implementations of the garbage collector and the just-in-time (JIT) compiler are different in the .NET Compact Framework than they are in the .NET Framework.

Note that the public key token for the .NET Compact Framework assemblies starts with 9 whereas the desktop equivalents start with B. You can use that information to quickly determine whether what you are deploying or referencing is a desktop or a device framework assembly.

Implementation approaches: retargeting, conditional branching, or a mix of both.

A runtime check is not enough because of JIT compiling.

Share the Code, Not the Binary.

There are two limitations with the retargetable approach: First, you can’t use any desktop-only types or methods in your code. They simply will not compile. Second, you must be careful not to load any device-specific assemblies on the desktop as they will fail with run-time exceptions.

From Share Code: Write Code Once For Both Mobile And Desktop Apps by Daniel Moth