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Master mobile programming with this title. It demonstrates how to use the Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio.Net to create applications for phones, Pocket PCs, and other portable devices. Focusing on ASP.NET and the .NET Mobile Web SDK, it shows how to deliver appropriately formatted content for diverse hand held clients from a single ASP.NET page.

"If you're interested in developing for this burgeoning platform, there is no one better able to get you up-to-speed.”

–From the Foreword by Rob Tiffany, mobility architect, Microsoft

Completely revised and updated for .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and 3.5, Visual Studio 2008, and Windows Mobile Smart Phones, Programming .NET Compact Framework 3.5, Second Edition, teaches you how to write highly effective applications for handheld wireless devices with small screens, limited memory, and finite battery life.

This book is the definitive tutorial and reference for the .NET Compact Framework and Windows Mobile. If you’re interested in developing for this burgeoning platform, there is no one better able to get you up to speed than industry veterans, master programmers, and teachers Paul Yao and David Durant.

With this book you will learn how to

• Use each of the ten API sets available for Windows Mobile; when to use each; and, especially, when to use Win32 and the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and 3.5
• Write programs that make the most of a Windows Mobile device’s limited battery life
• Efficiently invoke Win32 APIs from the .NET Compact Framework
• Write exceptional, data-driven applications using data binding and .NET controls
• Manage device data with the object store, file I/O, and the registry
• Work with databases using ADO.NET and LINQ
• Synchronize mobile data with remote databases and the remote API
• Make a mobile device work with the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
• Create graphical output on Windows Mobile devices

If you want to learn Windows Mobile development but only have limited experience with the .NET Framework, this is the only book you need.

You know all those hidden techniques and amazing features you spent months discovering in Visual Basic 6? Imagine you could read just one book and regain all of that knowledge. Imagine a book that clearly shows you how to do practically everything you want in .NET – and provides real-life code to get you there. Imagine a book that goes beyond the basics, yet doesn’t get bogged down in detail, a book that will save you hours. That’s what this book is all about; it is the number one book for all your VB.NET code demands.

The Microsoft® Windows® .NET Compact Framework brings the power of the .NET Framework to handheld devices such as Pocket PCs and smart phones. Learn exactly how to build killer applications—and how to solve typical problems—in developing for resource-constrained devices with this book. You’ll find specifics on how to develop GUI elements with Windows Forms, access and store data with Microsoft ADO.NET and integrate it across the enterprise with XML Web services, work with Microsoft SQL Server™ CE, develop applications that connect and disconnect across wireless networks, and more—all with working code samples. You even get a quick reference to the differences between the .NET Compact Framework and the full .NET Framework.

Topics covered include:

• Introducing the Windows .NET Compact Framework and architecture
• Developing applications with the Compact Framework
• GUI development with Windows Forms and building Windows Forms applications *Testing, debugging, completing, and distributing your applications
• Collection classes
• Working with dates and strings
• Working with XML
• Input and output
• Networking
• Application security features
• Accessing data
• Working with ADO.NET data objects
• Working with XML Web services
• Integrating data with SQL Server and using SQL Server CE
• Building custom controls
• Globalization and localization
• Multithreading
• Graphics programming
• Interoperating with native code
• Migrating embedded Visual Tools applications

Interactive web maps generated by MapPoint-Microsoft's popular mapping technology are crucial for businesses in a number of fields, including real estate, package delivery, and commercial air travel. In a word, MapPoint provides businesses with "location." Specifically, it provides an integrated set of products, servers, and services to enable a business to track the precise location of remote assets, thereby reducing operational costs and improving productivity. Whether the asset is a truck, a taxi, or even a field rep, MapPoint can tell you exactly where it is at any time.

Programming MapPoint in .NET from O'Reilly shows you how to use MapPoint to build custom applications for the desktop, the web, and mobile devices. The book also explains how to analyze and share data generated from a wide range of maps, including those that show demographic trends, population density, and sales potential. Chandu Thota, one of Microsoft's main MapPoint developers and the book's author, has organized the material into four major sections, each dedicated to a different MapPoint technology:

• MapPoint 2004 - calculating routes, rendering data maps, integrating with Global Positioning System (GPS) for obtaining real-time location
• MapPoint Web Service - techniques for finding points of interest, creating applications using the Find APIs and Route APIs, rendering LineDrive maps and polygons
• MapPoint Location Server - deployment scenarios, getting real-time location using mobile phones, managing contacts and privacy settings
• MSN Virtual Earth - the basics of programming with new MSN Virtual Earth APIs

The book provides a jumpstart for working with these technologies, including in-depth discussions about the core concepts and sample code provided in C#. It's ideal for anyone who wants to develop locations-based applications with MapPoint technologies.

The next time you follow online directions to the airport, you can chalk up an assist to MapPoint's state-of-the-art interactive mapping abilities. Better yet, you'll know how to create that same type of map yourself.

Essential Windows Phone 7.5 is the definitive guide to creating powerful, visually compelling mobile applications that take full advantage of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.5 platform. Nine-time Microsoft MVP Shawn Wildermuth draws on his extensive experience teaching Silverlight and Windows Phone development, helping you to get started fast and master techniques that lead to truly outstanding apps.

After introducing the latest version of Windows Phone, Shawn Wildermuth dives directly into the essentials, emphasizing best-practice examples and illustrating with code. You’ll build a complete application from start to finish, then build on your skills with increasingly sophisticated techniques.

From planning and design through application delivery, Shawn Wildermuth guides you through the entire mobile development lifecycle, showing how to make the most of Windows Phone 7.5’s most important new capabilities. Whether you’re a .NET or Silverlight developer going mobile, or an experienced mobile developer moving to Windows Phone, Essential Windows Phone 7.5 delivers all the skills you’ll need.

Coverage includes

• Leveraging Microsoft’s breakthrough Metro design language
• Using phone features such as email, calling, search, Web browsing, and the camera
• Designing the look and feel of your user interface with XAML
• Interacting with users via Panorama, Pivot, and other controls
• Mastering the new Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone 7.5
• Choosing the right application paradigm and functionality for your specific app
• Incorporating touch, vibration, motion, and sound into your interfaces
• Working with Windows Phone 7.5’s unique hubs and tiles
• Building location-based services that work with the phone’s GPS
• Storing data in Isolated Storage or Windows Phone 7.5’s database support
• Multitasking reliably, without compromising performance
• Integrating external data via REST, conventional Web services, and push notifications
• Preparing your application for the Windows Phone Marketplace

Today's market for mobile apps goes beyond the iPhone to include BlackBerry, Nokia, Windows Phone, and smartphones powered by Android, webOS, and other platforms. If you're an experienced web developer, this book shows you how to build a standard app core that you can extend to work with specific devices. You'll learn the particulars and pitfalls of building mobile apps with HTML, CSS, and other standard web tools.
You'll also explore platform variations, finicky mobile browsers, Ajax design patterns for mobile, and much more. Before you know it, you'll be able to create mashups using Web 2.0 APIs in apps for the App Store, App World, Ovi Store, Android Market, and other online retailers.

• Learn how to use your existing web skills to move into mobile development
• Discover key differences in mobile app design and navigation, including touch devices
• Use HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax to create effective user interfaces in the mobile environment
• Learn about technologies such as HTML5, XHTML MP, and WebKit extensions
• Understand variations of platforms such as Symbian, BlackBerry, webOS, Bada, Android, and iOS for iPhone and iPad
• Bypass the browser to create offline apps and widgets using web technologies

As the Web has moved onto mobile devices, developers have told themselves a lot of stories about what this means for their work. While some of those stories are true, others are misleading, confusing, or even dangerous.

It’s not the mobile web; it’s just the Web!

I’ve heard this quote many times in the last few years, and it’s true. It’s really the same Web. Think about your life. You don’t have another email account just for your mobile. (OK, I know some guys that do, but I believe that’s not typical!)

You read about the last NBA game on your favorite site, like ESPN; you don’t have a desktop news source and a different mobile news source. You really don’t want another social network for your mobile; you want to use the same Facebook or Twitter account as the one you used on your desktop. It was painful enough creating your friends list on your desktop, you’ve already ignored many people…you don’t want to have to do all that work again on your mobile.

For all of these purposes, the mobile web uses the same network protocols as the whole Internet: HTTP, HTTPS, POP3, Wireless LAN, and even TCP/IP. OK, you can say that GSM, CDMA, and UMTS are not protocols used in the desktop web environment, but they are communication protocols operating at lower layers. From our point of view, from a web application approach, we are using the same protocols.

So, yes…it’s the same Web. However, when developing for the mobile web we are targeting very, very different devices. The most obvious difference is the screen size, and yes, that will be our first problem. But there are many other not-so-obvious differences. One issue is that the contexts in which we use our mobile devices are often extremely different from where and how we use our comfortable desktops or even our laptops and netbooks.

Don’t get me wrong--this doesn’t mean that, as developers, we need to create two, three, or dozens of versions duplicating our work. In this book, we are going to analyze all the techniques available for this new world. Our objective will be to make only one product, and we’ll analyze the best way to do it.

You don’t need to do anything special about your desktop website.

Almost every smartphone on the market today--for example, the iPhone and Android-based devices--can read and display full desktop websites. Yes, this is true. Users want the same experience on the mobile web as they have on their desktops. Yes, this is also true. Some statistics even indicate that users tend to choose web versions over mobile versions when using a smartphone.

However, is this because we really love zooming in and out, scrolling and crawling for the information we want, or is it because the mobile versions are really awful and don’t offer the right user experience? I’ve seen a lot of mobile sites consisting of nothing but a logo and a couple of text links. My smartphone wants more!

One website should work for all devices (desktop, mobile, TV, etc.).

As we will see, there are techniques that allow us to create only one file but still provide different experiences on a variety of devices, including desktops, mobiles, TVs, and game consoles. This vision is called “One Web.” This is to an extent possible today, but the vision won’t fully be realized for years to come. Today, there are a lot of mobile devices with very low connection speeds and limited resources--non--smartphones—that, in theory, can read and parse any file, but will not provide the best user experience and will have compatibility and performance problems if we deliver the same document as for desktop. Therefore, One Web remains a goal for the future. A little additional work is still required to provide the right user experience for each mobile device, but there are techniques that can be applied to reduce the work required and avoid code and data duplication.

Mobile web is really easy; Just create a WML file.

I’m really surprised how many mobile websites are still developed using a technology deprecated many years ago: WML (Wireless Markup Language). Even in emerging markets, there are almost no WML-only web-capable devices on the market today. The worst part of this story is that these developers think that this is the markup language for the mobile web. Wrong! WML development was called mobile web (or WAP) development a couple of years ago, when the first attempt at building a mobile web was made. There are still a small proportion of WML-only devices available in some markets, but WML is definitely not the mobile web today.

Just create an HTML file with a width of 240 Pixels, and you have a mobile website.

This is the other fast-food way to think about the mobile web. Today, there are more than 3,000 mobile devices on the market, with almost 30 different browsers (actually, more than 300 different browsers if we separate them by version number). Creating one HTML file as your mobile website will be a very unsuccessful project. In addition, doing so contributes to the belief that mobile web browsing is not useful.

Native mobile applications will kill the mobile web.

Every solution has advantages and disadvantages. The mobile web has much to offer native applications, as Chapter 12 of this book will demonstrate. The mobile web (and the new concept of mobile widgets) offers us a great multi-device application platform, including local applications that don’t require an always-connected Web with URLs and browsers.

People are not using their mobile browsers.

How many Internet connections are there in the world?

1,802,330,457 (26% of the world’s population) at the beginning of 2010 (http://www.internetworldstats.com)

How many people have mobile devices?

4,600,000,000 (68% of the population) at the beginning of 2010 (U.N. Telecommunications Agency, http://www.itu.int)

So, one of the reasons why people are not using their mobile browsers may be because of us, the web producers. We are not offering them what they need. There are other factors, but let’s talk about what we can do from our point of view.

Opera Mini is a mobile browser for low- and mid-range devices. It is free and it has had more than 50 million downloads to date. This tells us that 50 million users wanted to have a better mobile web experience, so they went out and got Opera Mini. Do all the 4 billion plus worldwide mobile device users know about Opera Mini? Perhaps not, so it’s difficult to know how many would be interested in trying this different mobile web experience. However, 50 million downloads for only one browser that the user had to install actively is a big number for me. When Opera Mini appeared in Apple Inc.’s App Store, from which users can download and install applications for the iPhone, iPod, and iPad, 1 million users downloaded the browser on the first day. This is quite impressive.

Today, less than 4% of total web browsing is done from mobile devices. This percentage is increasing month by month. Mobile browsing may never become as popular as desktop browsing, but it will increase a lot in the following years.

In addition, user browsing on mobile devices will likely have a higher conversion rate. How many tabs do you usually have open at once in Internet Explorer or Firefox on your desktop or laptop? On a mobile device, when you browse you are more specific and more likely to act on what you find.

This book presents comprehensive guide to developing games for the Windows Phone and other Windows Mobile devices. It gives readers a complete grounding in the technologies from setting up their development environments through to advanced 3D graphics rendering. Uniquely, the book also discusses how readers can go about distributing their applications, both through conventional channels and through the new Windows Store (a rival to Apples iTunes store).
There have been numerous releases of the Windows Mobile platform, the most recent of which is Windows Mobile 6.5 (also known as Windows Phone). All platforms are developed using the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework.

Extend your programming expertise across the widest range of mobile devices with this incisive guide to Microsoft ASP.NET mobile controls. Now integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, ASP.NET mobile controls enable you to build applications that render intelligently on different devices—regardless of markup language, browser, or form factor. The authors expertly guide you through the mobile Web application development process, explaining how to fully exploit Visual Studio .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 for rapid and more flexible development. Discover how to create innovative, intuitive solutions—instead of wrestling with interoperability issues.

Learn how to:

• Build mobile Web Forms pages with device-independent properties, methods, and events
• Use “code-behind” techniques to separate programming logic from the UI
• Employ the standard controls or download new custom controls
• Build controls from scratch and program device adapters
• Create styles and style sheets
• Customize applications for specific devices with templates
• Access data using Microsoft ADO.NET and the Visual Database Tools
• Know when to use application vs. session state
• Apply best practices for using XML Web services in mobile applications
• Help secure applications with ASP.NET authentication services
• Develop multilingual and multicultural applications
• Debug code, trap runtime errors, and use software emulators to test applications
• Configure, package, and deploy applications

Imagine you're a network administrator. You're driving back from work after a really long day or you're enjoying a family get together and you start getting paged with a dreaded "server down" message. You leave everything and rush to your office to figure out what is going on with your servers. Even if everything is OK, as an administrator you may want to keep an eye on the health and other statistics of servers from time to time. Wouldn't it be nice if you could accomplish this from a mobile device without having to rush to a computer? This article, by Amir Khan, discusses how you can use Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit, .NET Performance Counters, and Windows Task Scheduler to develop a mobile web administration website that allows you to manage your servers via mobile devices (cell phones and PDAs).