Since most of the CE-based apps showing up online these days are written for the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and 3.5, I've been testing a lot of freeware .NET CF apps on my CE 5 and 6 devices, some of which have .NET CF 3.5 installed, some with .NET CF 2.0, and some with both. My generic 7" netbooks and Wabook Sky have both installed, but a check of the registry reveals only a value
(in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/.NET Compact Framework
) for 3.5 in all of them except one test unit on which I've flashed the Sylvania ROM, which has values for both 2.0 and 3.5.
(Isn't .NET CF 3.5 supposed to be backward compatible with .NET CF 2 apps?
)
Tinkering with .NET CF apps and the registries of the devices produces some confusing results:
1
) With both .NET CF 2.0 and 3.5 on the device but with only the .NET CF 3.5 registry value, running .NET CF 2.0 apps produces the "The application failed to load required components" error message. With the 2.0 registry value added, the message is replaced on all the apps by the "This application requires a newer version of the .NET Compact Framework" message. Weird, given that the newest version of .NET CF 2.0 is installed - running cgacutil.exe shows the version to be 2.0.7045
(SP2
), and both it and 3.5 are enabled in the registry.
(The same result happens in the device with the Sylvania ROM, from which I copied the registry key.
)
2
) Though cgacutil.exe shows the 3.5 version on each device to be 3.5.7283, the registry value for 3.5 on some of the devices is instead named
3.5.7338, which doesn't seem to exist in the list of release versions of .NET CF 3.5.
(According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Compact_Framework , the next release after 3.5.7283 was 3.5.9198.
)
I'm hoping that knowing why I'm getting these results may give clues to how I might get some .NET apps working that aren't so far on these core CE devices.
)
