Glenn Wiley's Blog

I'm convinced the .Net Compact Framework is the red-headed step child of MS.  Every time I work with it I encounter some sort of mysterious voodoo going on.  My Visual Studio environment (VS2008 SP1) has already crashed on me twice in the past hour with my favorite mysterious error message, telling me that it encountered an exception and has to close now, so sorry.  My all-time favorite bit of magic involves some code like this:

if (someControl.Visible)
{
     ....do something
     someControl.Visible = false;
}

This is a contrived example of something in real code...check if a control is visible, if so, do something and then set the visible property to false.  Nothing too complicated here.  Amazingly, when you step through the debugger, passing the statement that sets the control's visible property to false, you can check the visible property and it is still true.  WTF?  Hover over someControl.Visible, or type it into the immediate window, or do a quick watch on it - same result, and it's reproducible.  This kind of nonsense drives me crazy and it's only one of many such things I've encountered with .Net CF development.  And I'm using v3.5...man, I really feel for anyone who had to work with this in earlier versions.  I really hope v4.0 is better.  I probably don't have to tell anyone who's worked with this before about how painful the debugging process is.  Hit F5, get some coffee, come back and wait while it finishes deploying, get another cup of coffee, and maybe this time it's ready to step through.  Ugh.  Okay, rant complete.