.NET Mobile

.NET Mobile

Mobile technology
1. Today, Cell phones(mobile phones) have becoming part of our life style.

2. Now Mobile devices can connect to the Internet, and execute web applications contents.

3. Different mobile devices support different programming languages. Some support WAP and WML, some support HTML or a limited version of HTML, and some support both or a different language.

To support all types of mobile devices, developers must create one different application for each language.


NET Mobile, Microsoft has introduced a new platform for developing mobile applications.


Introduction
Before moving further, I want to give you a brief introduction.
.NET is a developmental platform introduced by Microsoft at their 2000 Professional Developers Conference (PDC). The following figure shows a simple architecture of the .NET framework application development.


Requirements for development

To develop mobile applications with .NET, you must download and install the following components. IE and the .NET SDK can be downloaded from the Microsoft MSDN site for free.

Windows 2000 Professional/Server/Advanced Server OS
Internet Explorer 5.5
.NET framework Beta 1
.NET Mobile Web SDK Beta 1
Your favorite WAP simulator.

The mobile controls provided by ASP .NET target, as the name suggests, mobile devices (cell phones, Palms, etc.). This article will give you an idea of how to develop mobile web applications using ASP .NET and the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET environment. It will describe some of the most important mobile specific controls but won't go deep into the subject. At the end we'll also take a look at the Pocket PC Emulator 2002 which is included in Visual Studio .NET.

The ways mobile pages are organized differ from the classic web pages that you see on your computer. One mobile page is represented by a Form and a typical file ( MobileWebForm1.aspx ) can contain multiple forms, therefore multiple pages. This way when you open a page with the WAP browser actually multiple pages will be loaded (represented by forms) and when you click a link to one of the other forms there will be no loading time because they are in the same page. There is a good reason for this. Some WAP browsers disconnect after they retrieve the webpage to save the battery of the mobile phone and the money if the connection is charged per minute. This way they won't have to reconnect every time a new form is loaded, if it is located in the same file.

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