Target the .NET Compact Framework using Visual Studio Express

Microsoft only supports Visual Studio Professional for developing Windows Mobile applications and, more generally, code based on the .NET Compact Framework. You get nice things like application deployment and emulators and remote debugging and all. But if you just want to compile something against the .NET Compact Framework, for example to check that you’re using supported methods and classes, you can do that with Visual Studio Express.

Create a project in Visual Studio Express and open it in a text editor. In the first “<PropertyGroup>” node, add the following at the end:

   1: <NoStdLib>true</NoStdLib>

This will tell MSBuild to not include mscorlib.dll automatically, so we can make it use the Compact Framework’s version.

Next, re-open the project in Visual Studio Express, delete all the system references (System.dll, System.Xml.dll, System.Data.dll, etc.), and re-add them, only this time use the Compact Framework’s assemblies. You’ll have to directly browse to those DLLs, as they probably won’t show up in the default dialog.

Now rebuild you application. It should build against the Compact Framework. You can test that by adding an instruction that’s unsupported, like for example “Thread.Sleep(TimeSpan)”.