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With the popularity of mobile and tablet devices, it’s no surprise that improving the mobile Web site development experience was such a focus in ASP.NET MVC 4. What’s nice is how well it succeeded, as Keith Burnell explains. The article covers features in the upcoming release of ASP.NET MVC4 targeted specifically at mobile Web site development. These features range from making it easier to create a mobile specific sites to making it less work to get your standard MVC site displaying correctly on mobile devices and finally making your feel native with jQuery Mobile.

You have decided to take the plunge and create a Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system-aware application. This decision comes with a new set of requirements when it comes to enabling Tablet PC-specific features and deployment of your application. This article will take you through the process of creating a Tablet PC-aware application and deploying it in the enterprise.

Most applications will require some form of text input. By using the ITextInputPanel API you can optimize the pen text-input experience on Tablet PCs.If you have ever used a Tablet PC, you have most likely used Tablet PC Input Panel. Input Panel is the handwriting input tool that lies on top of your application so that you can insert handwritten text into any non-ink enabled Microsoft Windows control. Using Input Panel programmability is a great way to ensure that Input Panel provides the best possible pen input user experience in your application.

The Tablet PC SDK makes it easy to incorporate digital ink and handwriting analysis into applications; and now the InkAnalysis API (available in Windows Vista as well as downlevel to the Microsoft Windows XP operating system through a redistributable) takes it one step further. Actually, the InkAnalysis API exposes some of the lower-level functions that make handwriting recognition possible. It also exposes some functionality that can improve recognition results, support shapes, alternative recognition results, and spatial analysis. In this article, I will take a deeper look into what goes on behind the scenes and how to take advantage of the tablet team's hard work.

When Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition appeared in 2002, developers were sometimes confused about whether to write code on a Tablet PC or if it were possible to develop Tablet PC applications on existing desktop computers.The solution turned out to be fairly straightforward, if less than intuitive. However, with the addition of Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPCs), multiple releases of the Tablet and Touch Technology API, and now the Windows Vista operating system, this question arises again: What do you need to do to set up your developer environment and create applications for these form factors?

Mobile PCs and Tablet PCs are a growing market segment and are of the utmost strategic importance to Microsoft. New developments in hardware, software, developer tools, and SDKs give developers many new opportunities.

One of the more interesting and challenging places to use Ink is in Web applications. But how can this technology, which is dependent on the physical relationship between the stylus, the digitizer, and the operating system, work over the Internet?

Digital Ink is only a collection of lines rendered on the screen, but with Ink recognition and analysis, you can turn it into meaningful information such as text, drawings, gestures, commands, and even the relationship between two shapes. The Tablet PC SDK makes it surprisingly simple to detect all these types of information in Digital Ink.

This Visual C# and Visual Basic .NET Starter Kit is a complete Mobile PC and Tablet PC application. The starter kit contains a semi-transparent form for taking notes and keeps them synchronized through a Web Service. It also supports battery awareness and online and offline data, two key features of a great Mobile PC applications. The project comes ready to compile and run and it's easy to customize with only a little extra programming. Download it from here.

Download Mobile Ink To-Do Starter Kit

The Real Time Stylus API provides an alternate way to receive pen input pen. This high performance API provides a great level of control to developers for a small penalty in added effort.