Various New features in .Net Compact Framework 2.0

In .NET Compact Framework 2.0 version many new features were added with an aim to increase the developer’s productivity and to facilitate a complete compatibility with the full .Net framework. Many enhancements make the new version .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and the newly provided feature of enhanced device support is certainly one of the well received improvements in the new version when compared with the earlier version.

The story is slightly different today and you can have devices that can have high resolution and multiple oriented display systems and such systems also throw challenges for the application developers further. But, whatever may be the level of challenge that such devices may throw at you, as a developer using the new .Net Compact Framework 2.0 the job of creating friendly user interfaces will be an easy task for you.

There are many new controls in .NET Compact Framework 2.0 version and to quote one, the new MonthCalendar control is capable of displaying the dates in a neatly designed visual display and the same also helps users to see and select dates in a graphical way. Another control by name DateTimePicker control makes it convenient for the user to enter the date and time details in a graphical manner.

You can also have a very rich and a variety of display properties with the help of the new WebBrowser and the Notification control can be made use for sending alerts or notification messages to the users without even actually disturbing the activity the user is currently engaged at.

Further any such notifications sent can be made to receive responses or inputs from the user by duly incorporating HTML links and buttons in the same HTML text of the notification. The other feature of DocumentList control helps the user in navigation and to take decisions such as deletion, copying, moving or renaming the files. The same DocumentList control can also be used by the user to send e-mail messages and to transfer files to other devices through infrared or other modes of file transfer.

The .NET Compact Framework 2.0 has several utilities for file management and displaying them. The recent concepts of Smart phones now support DataGrid control that can greatly aid in column size configuration, multiple display styles, handling of null values, data binding, and events to track user cell selections.

The next control feature of LinkLabel control is capable of displaying more than one hyperlinks. The Splitter control in one with which you can have a control of resizing docked controls. The Toolbar control is meant for displaying images as buttons. You can easily make the user controls to appear on the control Toolbox automatically and the same can be used by just dragging and dropping on the form.

The new .NET Compact Framework 2.0 also provides many display management features and layout methods that can help any administrator to create dynamic user interfaces fast and easy. The other two useful features that are made available in the new .Net Compact Framework 2.0 are the Control Anchoring and Docking Support.

Out of the two controls, the control anchoring feature is very useful for displaying the controls at predefined places or distances from the edges of the screen and even when the control’s size are altered, the distance will be maintained at the same level from the edge of the screen.

The new feature that has been incorporated into the Panel Control and other form is the AutoScroll property and when this is property is selected or made active (setting it as true) the system will enable an automatic scroll bar whenever the displayed controls exceeds more than one screen size.

A yet another useful feature is the AutoScale property and this property is very useful in displaying controls with varied resolution and the system takes care of the display automatically. For instance, if one of the control has been designed with a particular resolution then the Auto Scale feature can be made use to decide on the scale of other controls with varied resolution levels automatically. Further, now in the new 2.0 version the ResumeLayout and SuspendLayout support also have been incorporated for the benefit of users.

You can get almost all information about the current device display by making use of the Graphics class and you can even get to know the resolution of the display. Further, you can also arrive at the number of dots per inch or the pixels both in the vertical and horizontal coordinates using the DpiX and DpiY features.

Many novel features such as Rotatable fonts support and displaying texts with an angle effect for an effective custom drawing are also incorporated in the new .NET Compact Framework 2.0.

The custom pen feature can enable you to create pens with specific size and colour and it will be easy for you to work with bitmaps and you can even save all the related features in a file or in a stream for a later date retrieval and use. And for this purpose, a separate new class has been incorporated that supports BitmapData.

When it comes to keyboards, the new .NET Compact Framework 2.0 has provided many useful features that can make your work easy and fun. For example, the new Tab support can enable you to move between controls easily by just tapping the tab key and you can also find uses for the keys such as KeyUp, KeyDown, and KeyPress, which were left unused or not having any functional utility in the earlier versions.

In new .Net Compact Framework 2.0 version many new Data Classes were added and you can find the new classes very useful in accessing the Mobile edition of SQL Server 2005. If you want to access the mobile data base faster and with ease then you can find the new class by name SqlCeResultSet class very useful and this particular class is also made use as a source for data binding.

Amongst the various new classes that have been provided, the DataSet class comprises within it the methods such as GetChanges and the Merge. These Merge and GetChanges methods can be used for retrieving the changes made in the DataSet and for merging two or more DataSet classes with one another. A yet another method that has been incorporated in the DataSet class is the Copy method with which you can use for taking a copy of the particular DataSet along with the structure and data contained therein.

In DataTable class, handling of tables has been made easy with introduction of two more features of Serialization and Deserialization and for accessing this feature internally in the DataTable class, there are two methods by name WriteXml and ReadXml. By using these features you can now pass on the values of a DataTable as web service arguments. Further to make data binding more simple and easy, in the new .Net Compact Framework 2.0 you can find a new class by name BindingSource than can be made use for binding data to the data bound controls.

Security is gaining a dynamic proportion today and when it comes to security aspects, the new .NET Compact Framework 2.0 can never lag behind any of its closest competitor and it has been designed well by taking into account all the present day devices including the smart devices.

There are many Security features available in the .Net Compact Framework 2.0 and it also extends the most recent version of cryptography. Further, the new methods of integrity check or hashing such as MD5 and SHA2 and symmetric encryptions like DES, RC2, RC4 and 3DES are also made available in the .Net Compact Framework 2.0.
Besides the above-mentioned cryptography and encryption facility, .NET version 2.0 also provides support for Asymmetric encryptions such as RSA and DSA.

In the new .NET Framework, you can find various classes such as XmlDocument and XmlSerializer for handling the XML documents and with which you can have effective and increased communication levels. Further, such classes are also useful in providing various other capabilities for the new age smart devices and to know more about the new features and other available classes you can refer to the documentation in MSDN.