I recently ran into a problem with a Smart Device CAB Project in Visual Studio 2005, which as it turns out is a known issue. You can build a CAB file which will register your .NETCF dlls into the GAC – the File System Editor has a standard folder called “Global Assembly Cache Folder” which you can put your files into. Behind the scenes this deploys the dlls to the windows folder and generates a .GAC text file with a list of paths to your dll(s). The problem is that the generated GAC file is a Unicode text file and doesn’t work on devices prior to Windows Mobile 5.0. I’m assuming the same is true with generic CE 4.2 devices versus CE 5.0. In itself this seems bizarre since CE is fully Unicode based so shouldn’t have any problem reading the file. It just so happens that when you are doing this the old fashioned way with notepad you get an ANSI text file which works just fine on all devices.
The workaround is simple, don’t use the whizzy GAC support in the CAB project, place your dlls into the Windows Folder, and manually create a .GAC text file and place this in the Windows Folder also. The downside to this approach is that you must update your GAC file if you add or remove dlls from your setup project. I’d like to say thanks to fellow MVP Jan Yeh for helping to test the issue and to Manish Vasani from the Visual Studio for Devices team for following up with more details on the issue.
In The Hand Ltd 