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I want to develop for the Windows Embedded Compact real-time platform using .NET Compact Framework 3.5. But I cannot find any information about the integration within Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2012. For the latter one, there exist a plenty of blog entries announcing future support for embedded development, but there doesn't seem to be much information about concrete development tools.

So do I still need to use VS 2008? If yes, are there any alternatives regarding Embedded Development with .NET CF 3.5? It seems to me that the .NET CF 3.5 is a pretty worthwile platform for rapid embedded development so I wonder that there's so less information around the community.

mbue
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Yes. .NET CF 3.5 is only supported in Visual Studio 2008.

Microsoft thought Mobile Devices were a waste of time, so they abandoned in in Visual Studio 2010 in favor of chasing after the iPhone with their Windows 7 Phone.

Since then, the Android tablet has taken off, Microsoft has seen the error in their planning, but there Windows 7 platform was designed for a PC and did not work well when scaled back to Windows Phone.

So, a new operating system was designed to focus on the tablet at it's core and added functionality was built in to let this new tablet OS work on the desktop. That is what Windows 8 is: A Tablet OS.

Unfortunately for you and me, Microsoft never went back to add support for older VS2010.

VS2012 with SP1 is supposed to support the newer Win8 devices, but I have not gotten into any of that.

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    And VS2012 will support WEC (used to be WinCE) 2013 and CF 3.9 when it is released, purportedly by the end of this quarter. – ctacke Apr 15 '13 at 14:15
  • Thank you for your answers. It seems to me the discussion around WinCE is sort of "phone-driven" - many discussions focus on phones and tablets. However, Win CE also has the claim to be a good choice for embedded development (automation, automotive) but aside from some dedicated MSDN resources, Microsoft does not seem to spend alot of attention to these applications. Our problem is, that we need to integrate some .NET-based components into our automation solution, so the choices are rather limited here... – mbue Apr 16 '13 at 08:02