| Webcast showcases .NET CF 3.5 Power Toys |
Oct. 23, 2008
 Microsoft has published a webcast on.NET Compact Framework 3.5 Power Toys, including the Remote Performance Monitor, GC Heap Viewer, and .NET CF CLR Profiler. Viewable online now, the webcast is the eighth in a promised series of 24 devoted to Windows Mobile 6.1 software development.
(Click here for a larger view of the first slide in Microsoft's .NET CF 3.5 Power Toys webcast)
  The one-hour program is presented by long-time embeddded developer Maarten Struys (left), Microsoft community program manager Constanze Roman (right), and Microsoft documentation specialist Joshua Partlow (not pictured), Microsoft says. According to Microsoft's MSDN website, "24 Hours of Windows Mobile application development: .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Power Toys" explains the use of downloadable tools designed to assist those writing Windows Mobile applications using Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Compact Framework 3.5
The Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5 were first released in September 2007, then finalized several months later. The six tools included in the Power Toys package are:- Remote Performance Monitor and GC Heap Viewer
- NET .CF CLR Profiler
- App Configuration Tool (NetCFcfg.exe)
- .NET CF ServiceModel Metadata Tool
- Remote Logging Configuration Tool
- .NET CF Network Log Viewer
Of these, the online presentation by Struys, Roman, and Partlow is said to focus particularly on the Remote Performance Monitor, the GC Heap Viewer, and the .NET CF CLR Profiler. The program shows developers "how to identify and solve memory leaks inside managed applications, how to diagnose and solve performance bottlenecks, and how to minimize garbage collector activity," says Microsoft's description.
Microsoft's .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Power Toys webcast
(Click to enlarge)
Like the first seven webcasts in this promised 24-part series, "24 Hours of Windows Mobile application development: .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Power Toys" features a mix of PowerPoint slides, as pictured at the top of our story, plus video demonstrating the use of Visual Studio and the Windows Mobile device emulator, as pictured immediately above. The webcasts are typically broadcast live Wednesdays at 10 AM PDT, then subsequently made available on demand. Recent offerings have included guides to using Pocket Outlook functionality, developing "battery-friendly" applications and programming for different form factors.
Windows Embedded Evangelist Maarten Struys is a technical manager at PTS Software in the Netherlands. Struys speaks regularly at Windows-related conferences, according to Microsoft, and is also a freelance journalist who maintains a blog on the .NET for Devices website.
Constanze Roman, who has joined Struys for most of the webcasts, is a community program manager with Microsoft's Windows Mobile team. In addition to participating regularly in activities aimed at the Windows Mobile developer community, she maintains her own blog devoted to Windows Mobile development, Constanze's Mobile Musings.
Finally, Joshua Partlow is described as a documentation specialist who is part of Microsoft's Windows Mobile publishing team.
More about the Power Toys
According to Microsoft, the Remote Performance Monitor and GC Heap Viewer provides real-time counter data (ranging from Garbage Collector activity to type loading info) on a running .NET CF application. The GC Heap Viewer feature allows capturing the managed heap at any moment an app is running to view live references, and allows comparing multiple snapshots to find memory leak issues.
The NETCF CLR Profiler is said to be an instrumenting allocation profiler for .NET CF applications. It provides detailed allocation and callstack visualizations, and is useful for diagnosing memory management issues.
The App Configuration Tool (NetCFcfg.exe) is described as an on-device tool for specifying what version of the .NET CF runtime an application will run against, displaying installed versions of .NET CF, and displaying info about DLLs.
The NETCF ServiceModel Metadata Tool (netcfsvcutil.exe) allows creation of a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) client proxy to help developers consume WCF services on device, according to Microsoft. Like svcutil.exe, which is the desktop version of the utility, netcfsvcutil.exe is a command-line tool that generates service model code from metadata documents, and generates metadata documents from service model code.
Finally, the Remote Logging Configuration Tool enables users to easily configure logging options on a .NET CF device, including loader, interop, network, error and finalizer logs. The NETCF Network Log Viewer is described as a utility for viewing .NET CF network log data.
Further information
Microsoft's .NET Compact 3.5 Power Toys are downloadable from the company's website, here. To view "24 hours of Windows Mobile application development: .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Power Toys," go to MSDN, here. [A Windows Live ID and password will be requested].
To get a list of other available webcasts devoted to Windows Mobile development, see Microsoft's website, here.
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