.NETCF v2.0 Beta 2 Redistribuable Package

I’m sure I don’t need to mention that Microsoft recently released Beta 2 of their Visual Studio 2005 tools. Alongside this release a redistributable version of the .NETCF v2.0 runtime is available so that you can download to your devices and test code you can download the package here.

Ilya Tumanov posted some useful information on the release on the newsgroup:-

“Visual Studio 2005 download is not required; installation of NETCF V2 Beta
2 won’t break existing VS 2003 and/or NETCF V1.
It also works side by side with CF V1 on device (in ROM or RAM).

If you’re planning to install VS 2005 Beta 2 later on, you would have to
uninstall NETCF V2 prior to VS installation.

We would appreciate if you try your CF V1 application(s) under V2 and
report incompatibilities so we could fix them.

Here’s how to run existing V1 applications under V2:

1. Install V2 on to the device (via Active Sync or copy CAB file to the
device and click on it).
2. Create a configuration file named <App_Name>.exe.config as follows:

<configuration>
<startup>
<supportedRuntime version=”v2.0.5056″/>
</startup>
</configuration>

To try application without V1 compatibility enabled, the following section
can be added:

<runtime>
  <compatibilityversion major=”2″ minor=”0″/>
  </runtime>

To run V2 application in V1 compatibility mode (for example if V2 app uses
V1 component), section can be changed as follows:

<runtime>
  <compatibilityversion major=”1″ minor=”0″/>
  </runtime>

3. Copy configuration file to the application folder.
4. Run application as usual.

Please report problems with installation and/or compatibility to this NG.
For CAB problems, please attach CAB log file “Microsoft .NET CF
2.0.LOG.TXT” which can be found in device’s root folder. Thanks.”

Even if you are not currently evaluating the Visual Studio 2005 tools, I would recommend downloading these runtimes and testing your existing code – there are a number of cases where behaviour has changed in v2.0 but as you can see above you can run an app with v1.0 compiled code in compatibility mode.