Il .NET Compact Framework non contiene l'oggetto BinaryFormatter. Se si ha la necessità di serializzare un oggetto in formato binario, ci viene in aiuto il CompactFormatter:
The CompactFormatter is a generic formatter for the .NET Compact Framework. It is fully realized in .NET managed code and this means that it is able to work on every device able to support the .NET Compact Framework or every other standard-compliant CLI implementation... The interface that the CompactFormatter class expose to the user is very similar to the BinaryFormatter ( or SOAPFormatter ) one and so using it ( or, to some extents, porting applications from .NET to it ) should be very simple for people who knows how to use standard .NET Full Formatters.
Il download comprende una class library compilata con il .NET Compact Framework 1.0, la versione per Mono e il codice sorgente sotto forma di progetto per Visual Studio 2005.