[en] A highly excited compound nucleus decays mainly by emission of n,p and α and by nuclear fission. A detailed understanding of the competition between the different decay modes implies that the dependence of the evaporation probability on the deformation of the compound nucleus and its angular momentum is carefully studied. We present a new approach to the evaporation theory which is based on the Thomas-Fermi approximation. First numerical results show that the average transmission coefficient depends rather strongly on the nuclear deformation and rather weakly on the rotational frequency