Building Mobile Web Applications with .NET Mobile Web SDK & ASP.NET
by Srinivasa Sivakumar.S
Introduction To .NET
Before moving further, I want to give you a brief introduction to .NET and how it works. .NET is a developmental platform introduced by Microsoft
at their 2000 Professional Developers Conference (PDC). The .NET framework is currently in Public Beta 1. The following figure
shows a simple architecture of the .NET framework application development.
When an ASP.NET page request comes from a web client such as IE or a mobile device, IIS will pick up the request and forward it to the .NET framework.
If the ASP.NET page is requested for the first time then the .NET framework will compile the ASP.NET page into the intermediate language (IL).
Then the IL code will be complied in to native code by a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler. As you can see, the .NET framework is the heart of the ASP.NET
application. The .NET framework will supply the need resources and the language compiler of your choice to compile the code.
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.
Let’s Start Developing!
To develop mobile applications with .NET, we must to include the Mobile Web namespace (System.Mobile.UI) exposed by the .NET Mobile Web SDK
(Via the MobileUI.DLL file). For those who are new to the term namespace, namespaces are something like header files in C++ and
References in Visual Basic. Basically the namespaces will provide the required classes to develop the application.
Developing a mobile web application with the .NET framework is very easy.
- Create an ASP.NET page
- Include the Mobile Web Namespace System.Mobile.UI
- Design the page with Mobile Controls
Simple isn't it?!?
Next: Mobile Controls
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