It really yanks my chain when I put my faith into what is presumably a solid foundation for my code, and end up running into a huge number of unexpected pitfalls.

Be warned: .NET Compact Framework is incomplete. Oh yes, it's a fleshed out version of CF 1.0 with generics and various important bits and pieces finally included (COM interop. I mean, seriously, .NET is useless without it even on the desktop), but it's still lacking a lot of vital components (ActiveX hosting) and has major shortcomings in others (no XSLT support). But that isn't the worst of it: the documentation is sparse at best, and flat out wrong in some cases.

You cannot use asynchronous delegates in .NET CF 2.0.

In case it isn't clear to you, let me repeat it: you can't use Delegate.BeginInvoke. If you're really unlucky, like me, you'll write a bunch of code and go on to compile, run, test and debug it and then run into a completely bogus NotSupportedException on a seemingly innocuous internal method call, and have to do some serious digging to figure out the culprit. This goes particularly well with (admittedly documented) fineprint in methods such as Windows Media Player's player.URL property setter, which for some reason mustn't be called from an event handler.