Deployment
To be able to run applications powered by the .NET Compact Framework, the platform must support the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework runtime. Some operating systems which do include .NET CF are Windows CE 4.1, Microsoft Pocket PC, Microsoft Pocket PC 2002, Smartphone 2003, and Symbian v3. .NET Compact Framework applications can be run on desktop computers with the full .NET Framework as long as they only access the shared parts of both frameworks, though their user interface can not be upgraded to look like that of an application developed for desktop PCs.
A version of the .NET Compact Framework is also available for the Xbox 360 console. While it features the same runtime as the regular .NET CF, only a subset of the class library is available. This version is used by XNA Framework to run managed games on the console. There are other limitations as well, such as the number of threads being limited to 256. Unlike other versions of .NET CF, the Xbox 360 version allows setting processor affinity to threads created. The threads are scheduled among four concurrent threads running on the multiple processor cores of the system.
Read more about this topic: .NET Compact Framework