Microsoft has announced that .NET Compact Framework 3.9 (NETCF 3.9) will be included in the upcoming release of Windows Embedded Compact 2013. It provides improved start-up time for apps, enhanced memory utilization and management, Visual Studio 2012 support with the ability to build responsive apps with the help of new garbage collector.
NETCF 3.9 will have support for multi-core hardware which enables you to take advantage of multiple cores on embedded devices. It will also include support for Thumb2 instruction set that enables your apps to run faster because of the more compact instruction representation. Moreover, the runtime also takes advantage of ARM VFP instructions which enhances performance of apps.
The runtime provides support for sharing server which has the ability to improve app start-up time by sharing loaded assemblies and JIT machine code across apps and also by reducing memory usage. This feature will be useful when multiple apps run simultaneously on a device and will also enhance battery life.
“The app performance will be significantly improved because of the new garbage collector which resulted in 50-60% drops in GC time during testing phase and also provides a 30-40% faster allocation rate thus reducing pausing,” says Abhishek Mondal, Program Manager, .NET Compact Framework.
As mentioned above, NETCF 3.9 includes support for Visual Studio 2012, which means that developers will be able to build Windows, Windows Phone and Windows Embedded Compact apps using a single development environment. Moreover, embedded developers can take advantage of ALM tools and TFS included with Visual Studio 2012.
According to Abhishek, developers should see significantly better performance characteristics of applications on both x86 and ARM devices, running Windows Embedded Compact 2013.
