You might have noticed that SDF 2.0 no longer has serial or GPS classes.  This is intentional.  CF 2.0 now has serial classes and the Windows Mobile AKU includes GPS support.  We realize that there are some of you out there that are using GPSes on non-WM 5.0 devices and that you'd like to be able to use our stuff under Studio 2005.  For those people, we've spun the Serial and GPS classes into a stand-alone assembly: OpenNETCF.IO.Serial.  There are no plans for an installer for this assembly, and unless we get strong feedback it probably won't make it into the SDF either.

If you're a Windows CE device developer and you've got a device with a persistent registry, you're probably already aware that the CF Registry class doesn't help much for saving the registry, restoring branches from a file or creating volatile keys.  Once again the SDF is here to help with CreateVolatileSubkey, RestoreHiveBasedKey, RestoreRamBasedRegistry, SaveHiveBasedKey and SaveRamBasedRegistry.

One note - the doc says they're in the Registry2 class - that's already been changed to RegistryHelper.

Making apps power aware, especially through the device Power Manager works, but the code is kind of ugly and a pain to implement.  Once again SDF 2.0 simplifies things:

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using OpenNETCF.WindowsCE;

namespace WindowsCETest
{
  public partial class MyPowerAwareClass
  {
    public MyPowerAwareClass()
    {
      DeviceManagement.DeviceWake +=
       new DeviceNotification(DeviceManagement_DeviceWake);

      PowerManagement.PowerUp += new DeviceNotification(PowerManagement_PowerUp);
    }

    void PowerManagement_PowerUp()
    {
      MessageBox.Show("The Power Manager says I'm awake!");
    }

    void DeviceManagement_DeviceWake()
    {
      MessageBox.Show("Device notifications say I'm awake!");
    }
  }
}

The Windows CE operating system supports several notifications for common device events liek changes in AC power, network status changes and time changes.  They are exposed by using the CeRunAppAtEvent or CeSetUserNotification APIs.  While the Windows Mobile Notification Broker provides an interface for some of these, it doesn't provide access to all of them, nor is it available for general Windows CE developers.

SDF 1.4 provided a set of Notification classes that could be used to get these (and those classes are still there in SDF 2.0) but we felt that a simple object model around these would really be a nice thing to have.  So we created the OpenNETCF.WindowsCE.DeviceManagement class.  Now subscribing to the notifications is as simple as this example of detecting when the device time has been modified:

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using OpenNETCF.WindowsCE;

namespace WindowsCETest
{

public class MyClass
{

public MyClass()
{

    DeviceManagement.TimeChanged +=
        new DeviceNotification(DeviceManagement_TimeChanged);
}

void DeviceManagement_TimeChanged()
{
    MessageBox.Show("The time was just changed.");
}

}

We're extremely close to a beta release of SDF 2.0.  To give you a taste of what's in it, we've posted the online documentation.  Any feedback is appreciated.  Enjoy.