I'm finally digging into the Compact Framework and doing some digging on setting up my environment to make it feasible at home. I haven't touched the CE space in a while and only used the C++ 3.0 compiler for CE at that. My biggest questions are (1) machine setup and (2) development environment.
For machine setup, I'm looking at expanding my home desktop to a dual-processor unit. This would allow me to run the CF development environment on a dedicated processor under Virtual PC with plenty of RAM. I like the virtual PC setup, but I've always wanted more horsepower for running stuff like VS2k5 and Sql2k5 - I think I can finally justify this. I'm looking at the MSI board for a dual opteron or AMD 64 chips, probably going with the dual Opteron chips. I'm a little leary of the board because TomsHardware points out that this board has a problem with some SysMark benchmarks back in 2004 when overclocked - but it should be fine in stock mode. This is definitely less expensive than going with the Xeon processors. I figure if I can run with 1 GB or 1.5GB of RAM I'll be just fine (for now).
Next, I want to drive the compact framework development using NUnit. I think the benefits of NUnit-style tests along with memory profiling on these devices will be even more useful given the constraints of the operating environment. I did some digging and found a couple pieces worth looking at:
I'm looking foward to this, I'll blog some bits as I move forward. If you have any recommendations on these setups or resources to look for, please drop a comment!