SDK Workaround: Visual Studio 2005 Required for .NET Compact Framework Development

This workaround applies to:

 

·         The prerelease Windows SDK for Windows Server 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 (RC0), September, 2007

·         The prerelease Windows SDK for Windows Server 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 (IDS04), July, 2007

·         The Windows SDK Update for Windows Vista (RTM), March, 2007

 

The SDK provides documentation and sample code that targets the .NET Compact Framework. However, actual development of .NET Compact Framework applications requires Visual Studio 2005. When building a sample that depends on the .NET Compact Framework, you might see this error:

 

C:\Sample\Foo.csproj(57,11): error MSB4019: The imported project "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.CompactFramework.CSharp.targets" was not found. Confirm that the path in the declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.

 

To workaround this issue, download and install the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 Redistributable or the pre-release .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Beta1 Redistributable.