Beginning .NET mobile application development

As is evidence by the proliferation of mobile devices and their increasing use for more than just phone calls, particularly in the developing world, these development challenges are here to stay.

For .NET developers, a couple courses of action can be taken. The .NET Compact Framework, a subset of the .NET Framework, works well for developing applications for PocketPC and Smart Phone implementations. ASP.NET, too, can be used, and is a good option for applications that will be deployed on numerous devices.

Thom Robbins, director of .NET platform marketing at Microsoft, has recently penned two quite comprehensive tutorials for .NET mobile application developers.

The first tutorial, Mobile Web Development with ASP.NET 2.0, demonstrates how to use Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 to build applications that are able to, as Robbins put it, "adaptively render for a wide range of protocols, device specific behaviors and browser types."

This document can be divided into four sections of unequal length:

• An overview of the ASP.NET Mobile Namespaces and how they perform application rendering techniques such as identifying the browser that a mobile device is running.
• A quick look at how the lifecycle of a mobile application differs from that of a typical ASP.NET application; most of the differences are attributable to device adaptor-specific operations.
• A walkthrough of how mobile Web applications are built using Visual Studio 2005.
• Finally, a look at the vast number of Mobile Web Form Controls with which developers should be acquainted. Some of these, like validation controls, are identical to those used for ASP.NET Web applications. Others, like the Calendar and TextBox, bring a bit less to the table than the full-scale ASP.NET Controls. Others still, like the SelectionList, combine several ASP.NET Web server controls into a single bundle.

The second ...

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tutorial, Developing Mobile Applications with the Compact Framework 2.0, focuses on the use of Visual Studio 2005 and the Compact Framework.

This document dives into the following topics:

• The various files associated with the Compact Framework 2.0.
• The use of the smart device application template within Visual Studio 2005 for application development.
• The design issues, which range from CPU cycles to latency to unpredictable network connectivity, which mobile application developers may be encountering for the first time.
• The Namespaces within the Compact Framework and how they are best used.
• The process of binding an application to SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition -- which is the database of choice for Compact Framework applications -- and the data types supported by SQL Server 2005 Mobile.
• The use of emulators to test applications without actually possessing the device(s) on which the application will be running.

Finally, we would be remiss in not pointing out that Research in Motion offers a BlackBerry plug-in for Visual Studio 2005. This plug-in provides a set of BlackBerry application components and lets developers use the architecture of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server within VS 2005.

More on mobile application development from SearchVB.com
Reference: Mobile and Wireless Development Learning Guide
News: .NET Micro Framework: Ubiquitous computing for smart devices

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