The problem lies to the usage of Assembly.Load method in CompactFormatter instead of Assembly.LoadWithPartialName (which is not present in the Compact Framework). To read details about the problem and, more interesting, about its solution look at CompactFormatter FAQ at project homepage.

After more than one year of silence i finally found the time to rewrite compact formatter from scratch (really speaking code was ready since last summer but i never found time to write documentation and, honestly, even current documentation can be highly improved...)

To celebrate the 1.0 milestone i decided to put CompactFormatter project on NovellForge, this will give us forums, bug and issue trackers and some other goodies; feel free to use them...

Small update to fix an error i placed in the previous version that made the 0.11.2 nearly useless (I was so proud of bugfixes in 0.11.2 that i forgot to run old tests properly...)
Now it should be fixed. Sorry for disadvantages.

Tons of bug fixed thanks to the help of Peter Bromberg (Thank you Pete!)
Now CompactFormatter correctly handles serialization of DataSet objects.
The whole serialization algorithm has been heavily modified and now it should be more robust and more efficient (Garbage Collector is called less often).
Unfortunately the size of the data stream produced during the serialization phase has been increased but i've a couple of ideas to decrease it again.

This version fixed a couple of bugs occurring during serialization of self-referencing objects and enum types.
Added also some meaningful exception message to CompactFormatter exceptions (lack of parameterless constructor, etc...)

This version fixes a bug preventing correct serialization of custom object arrays.

The first version of CompactFormatter (V 0.9.3 - Codename Monga) is up and ready for you to try.
It's released under LGPL and currently in Beta, this means that you can use it as you like and that it's possible to find some occasional bugs in it. If you think you've found a bug in the CompactFormatter please mail me and i'll try to correct it ASAP.