If you're building a CE image and want to include CF 1.0 or CF 2.0, then it's pretty simple - just drag the component from the catalog into your workspace.  But what if you don't want to include the CF at all, but still have the plumbing there so your end-user can install the CF themselves and have it work?  One could look through the cesysgen.bat files and decipher what needs to be set or, if you're lazy like me, you could ask the CF team.

Here's the answer, courtesy of Jim Suplizio:

The appropriate support sysgen will have to be added to the image depending on what version of CF is going to be installed.

• SYSGEN_DOTNET_SUPPORT is the CF 1.0 support sysgen.
• SYSGEN_DOTNETV2_SUPPORT is the CF 2.0 support sysgen. SYSGEN_DOTNETV2_SUPPORT is a super-set of the CF 1.0 support.

Effectively if SYSGEN_DOTNETV2_SUPPORT is added to the image then the end user can deploy either 1.0 or 2.0 and all of the required underlying CE OS pieces will be there.

Keep in mind that required means "base functionality". CF 2.0 has optional functionality that requires other SYSGENS and they are as follows:

• Message Queuing - SYSGEN_MSMQ
• Soap Reliable Messaging Protocol - SYSGEN_MSMQ_SRMP
• SQLMobile (2005) requires CoCreateGuid functionality - SYSGEN_OLE_GUIDS
• IPv6 - SYSGEN_TCPIP6
• IE, PIE, HTMLView (htmlview.dll) or nothing - SYSGEN_IE, SYSGEN_PIE, SYSGEN_HELP or simply nothing.
• The following only apply to the MainstoneII, other devices will only have null driver sets:
  • D3D Mobile - BSP_D3DM_XSCALE
  • D3D Mobile - SYSGEN_D3DMXSCALE

It's been a while since we visited the OpenNETCF.Deskop.Communication library, but there have been lingering issues that ActiveSync 4.x have exposed (a stack imbalance exception).  So today I revisited the library and did some fixes to it as well as to the sample app (bad, bad me for not marshaling calls to the UI from a thread.  It's now a Studio 2005 project.

The latest code is in Vault and the downloads on the site are updated to this new version (2.9) as well.

SDF 2.0 continues to have functionality for working with the time and time zones for devices.  The differences from SDF 1.x are a namespace change, a classname change (don't believe the beta docs or the beta, these have changed since that drop), and under the hood a lot more internal checks are going on to head off errors and to provide correct device support.  Basically this one has been pretty heavily tested across a broad range of devices.

Some quick highlights:

Getting and Displaying a List of Time Zones

using OpenNETCF.WindowsCE;
...
// get and display all available zones
TimeZoneCollection tzc = new TimeZoneCollection();
tzc.Initialize();

foreach (TimeZoneInformation tzi in tzc)
{
    lstZones.Items.Add(tzi);
}

Displaying the Currently Set Time Zone

using OpenNETCF.WindowsCE;
...
// get and display the currrent zone
TimeZoneInformation currentTz = new TimeZoneInformation();
DateTimeHelper.GetTimeZoneInformation(ref currentTz);
lblCurrentZone.Text = currentTz.StandardName;

Setting the Current Time Zone (from the Listing above)

using OpenNETCF.WindowsCE;
...
if (lstZones.SelectedItem != null)
{
    TimeZoneInformation tzi = (TimeZoneInformation)lstZones.SelectedItem;
    DateTimeHelper.SetTimeZoneInformation(tzi);

    // this verifies that the time zone did indeed get changed
    TimeZoneInformation tz = new TimeZoneInformation(
        (byte[])Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey("Time").GetValue(
            "TimeZoneInformation"));
    MessageBox.Show("Current Timezone in Registry is:\r\n" 
        + tz.StandardName, "Verified");
}

Displaying the Current Time (without DateTime.Now)

using OpenNETCF.WindowsCE;
...
DateTime dt = DateTimeHelper.SystemTime;

txtHour.Text = dt.Hour.ToString();
txtMinute.Text = string.Format("{0:00}", dt.Minute);
txtSecond.Text = string.Format("{0:00}", dt.Second);

Setting The Current System Time (Local Time is Analogous)

using OpenNETCF.WindowsCE;
...
// get the current time so we can copy the date part
DateTime dt = DateTimeHelper.SystemTime;

DateTimeHelper.SystemTime = new DateTime(dt.Year, dt.Month, dt.Day,
    int.Parse(txtHour.Text), int.Parse(txtMinute.Text), int.Parse(txtSecond.Text));

I'm trying to debug an error in some managed code related to timezones when a P/Invoke is throwing a native access violation exception.  To make sure it's not something with the platform itself I decided to do the same in native code first to ensure that it's not some platform limitation or bug.  Surprisingly I didn't readily find any sample code for doing it, so here's my contribution to the community at large.  It uses dynamic loading (and it doesn't make sure that the function loads succeed, so you might want to add error checking if you actually intend to use this):

#include <windows.h>

typedef void    (*INITCITYDB)(void);
typedef void    (*UNINITCITYDB)(void);
typedef void    (*LOADTZDATA)(void);
typedef void    (*FREETZDATA)(void);
typedef int        (*GETNUMZONES)(void);
typedef void *    (*GETTZDATABYOFFSET)(int, int*);
typedef void *    (*GETTZDATA)(int);

struct TZData
{
    TCHAR *Name;
    TCHAR *ShortName;
    TCHAR *DSTName;
    int GMTOffset;
    int DSTOffset;
};

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
    TZData *pTZ = NULL;
    int index;

    // load the library
    HINSTANCE hLib = LoadLibrary(_T("CityDB.dll"));

    // load the CityDB functions
    INITCITYDB InitCityDB = (INITCITYDB)GetProcAddress(
            hLib, _T("InitCityDb"));
    UNINITCITYDB UninitCityDB = (UNINITCITYDB)GetProcAddress(
            hLib, _T("UninitCityDb"));
    LOADTZDATA ClockLoadAllTimeZoneData = (LOADTZDATA)GetProcAddress(
            hLib, _T("ClockLoadAllTimeZoneData"));
    FREETZDATA ClockFreeAllTimeZoneData = (FREETZDATA)GetProcAddress(
            hLib, _T("ClockFreeAllTimeZoneData"));
    GETNUMZONES ClockGetNumTimezones = (GETNUMZONES)GetProcAddress(
            hLib, _T("ClockGetNumTimezones"));
    GETTZDATABYOFFSET ClockGetTimeZoneDataByOffset = 
            (GETTZDATABYOFFSET)GetProcAddress(hLib, _T("ClockGetTimeZoneDataByOffset"));
    GETTZDATA ClockGetTimeZoneData = (GETTZDATA)GetProcAddress(
            hLib, _T("ClockGetTimeZoneData"));

    // Init the library
    InitCityDB();

    // load the TZ data
    ClockLoadAllTimeZoneData();

    // find out how many zones are defined
    int zoneCount = ClockGetNumTimezones();

    // interate through them all
    for(int zone = 0 ; zone < zoneCount ; zone++)
    {
        // these are pointers to a timezone data struct
        pTZ = (TZData*)ClockGetTimeZoneDataByOffset(zone, &index);
    }

    // unload the TZ data
    ClockFreeAllTimeZoneData();

    // uninit the library
    UninitCityDB();

    return 0;
}

CE supports a Multimedia timer, though it's not in CF 1.0 or 2.0.  We've rectified that in SDF 2.0 (though your platform must support the Multimedia timer to use it - meaning WM and PPC are out).

So what do high-performance timers buy you?  Well if you look at how a regular timer works, they run at a really low priority and are horrible if you want anything that resembles deterministic behavior.  If you set the interval to say 1000ms, it's guaranteed to not fire in less than 1000ms, but there's actually no upper bound at all.  Jitter of 50ms (5%) would not be exceptional and in fact I've seen substantially worse on systems with a high load.

Our Timer2 class (name is still not finalized, so don't finalize on it) is based on the desktop's Timer class and provides things like a one-shot capability (timer fires once and never again without you having to disable it) and if you derive from it you can have it run a callback instead of raising an event.

Here's a quick example of usage:

void StartMyOneshotTimer
{
  // create a timer
  Timer2 oneShot = new Timer2();

  // make it a one-shot timer
  oneShot.AutoReset = false;

  // fire 3 seconds from enabling
  oneShot.Interval = 3000;

  // allow 10ms latitude for when it fires
  // so it will fire between now + 2995 and now + 3005
  oneShot.Resolution = 10;

  oneShot.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(oneShot_Elapsed);

  oneShot.Start();
}

void oneShot_Elapsed(object sender, ElapsedEventArgs e)
{
  // do something here
}