The code that needed to be rewritten was the code generated by the UI design tool - I forget what it's called. I had one form with a tab control on it, and each page has multiple controls on it; it took over four seconds to load. I moved the code around so that the controls for only the visible tab were instantiated as needed, instead of having all the controls on all the tabs instantiated when the form was created. That brought the time down to under a second, which still sucked, but was usable.
I was using CF 1.1 (2.0 is said to be faster, but it wasn't available at the time). As for (b), I'm talking about the IDE itself. I just opened the project in Visual Studio 2005, and it still is horribly laggy. Other developers I work with see the same issues, so it's not just my machine. I'm glad to hear your experience is different; my project used SQL CE as the database, and a simple join seems to take forever.
I've used Visual Studio to develop a handheld app (using C# and the.Net Compact Framework v1.1) and two things struck me immediately:
(a) C# on handhelds is really, really slow. We're talking a perceptible lag when switching between screens; I had to rewrite the automatically generated code to speed up form loading.
(b) Visual Studio (2003/2005 both) is even slower. It always seemed to take at least 2 seconds to respond to clicks, and as for startup time, I was fooled several times into thinking that my PC had crashed, even after using it for weeks. It's just pathetic.
I switched to using C++, wxWidgets and SQLite for my next app on a handheld, and I'm so happy we did. BTW, both apps are targeted at handhelds with barcode scanners (Symbol), and there are C based SDKs available.
Slashdot Mirror
The code that needed to be rewritten was the code generated by the UI design tool - I forget what it's called. I had one form with a tab control on it, and each page has multiple controls on it; it took over four seconds to load. I moved the code around so that the controls for only the visible tab were instantiated as needed, instead of having all the controls on all the tabs instantiated when the form was created. That brought the time down to under a second, which still sucked, but was usable.
I was using CF 1.1 (2.0 is said to be faster, but it wasn't available at the time). As for (b), I'm talking about the IDE itself. I just opened the project in Visual Studio 2005, and it still is horribly laggy. Other developers I work with see the same issues, so it's not just my machine. I'm glad to hear your experience is different; my project used SQL CE as the database, and a simple join seems to take forever.
I've used Visual Studio to develop a handheld app (using C# and the .Net Compact Framework v1.1) and two things struck me immediately:
(a) C# on handhelds is really, really slow. We're talking a perceptible lag when switching between screens; I had to rewrite the automatically generated code to speed up form loading.
(b) Visual Studio (2003/2005 both) is even slower. It always seemed to take at least 2 seconds to respond to clicks, and as for startup time, I was fooled several times into thinking that my PC had crashed, even after using it for weeks. It's just pathetic.
I switched to using C++, wxWidgets and SQLite for my next app on a handheld, and I'm so happy we did. BTW, both apps are targeted at handhelds with barcode scanners (Symbol), and there are C based SDKs available.