Compact Framework Woes, revisted

A cautionary tale for CF development...

Previously, I mentioned a compact framework permissions gotcha that was hurting protobuf-net. Other than making thinks public, I never got much further, but at least I can understand the issue.

Well, now I have hit another issue (in the wild); for a complex model, the VM is throwing a MissingMethodException - but simply when invoking a regular generic method - no reflection etc:

    prop = CreateProperty<T>(type, ref format);

This surfaces in a test case where we add lots of different (but very similar) types to the model - eventually it simply gives up, and can't resolve the generic method (even though it worked fine for the identical property on the last "n" similar types). One can only assume that it has hit an internal limitation of the CF runtime.

The good news is that the regular framework doesn't exhibit this; the bad news is that this doesn't help me... to support complex models I expect I will have to take out some of the generics, and use a bit more casting / boxing. Which probably won't kill me.

In truth, I've probably out-clevered myself through over-use of generics - and in some ways, it has stopped me using a decorator quite as cleanly as I'd like. Lesson learnt...