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:

• The CFNUnitBridge allows you to run unit tests on the emulated device with an anticipated release that will support running on the actual device. (via Trey Hucheson's blog)  Given the posts about this piece, it sounds like it's in the very early stages and just being pulled together.  However this might be a nice project to get involved in. 
• Roy Osherove points out the .Net Compact Framework Quickstart Tutorial site that has some useful bits.

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!