As business systems become increasingly distributed, the mobile device becomes an increasingly important tool on the enterprise stage. The large amount of processing power available to mobile devices nowadays bring to it a whole new range of possibilities as a mobile extension to traditional server-based enterprise systems.
Harnessing this power is the .NET Compact Framework, which has seen tremendous improvements over the last few versions. The .NET Compact Framework provides a rich set of managed classes that does away with a big chunk of the menial labor required to perform common tasks, leaving the developer to focus on building business logic instead.
This book is not intended to be a complete reference tome of the .NET Compact Framework. There are numerous books and documentation online that serve this purpose. Rather, it will show you how to apply the .NET Compact Framework in interesting ways to solve real-world business problems. We will explore commonly encountered design decisions and technology comparisons along the way and ultimately build clean solutions that keep to best practices such as the three-tier design and the Model View Controller (MVC) model.
Using a sales force application as the central example and theme in this book, you will have a clear step-by-step guide on building one of the most popular types of business applications in the market today from ground up. Through these pages, you will learn how to create robust data-driven mobile applications that work seamlessly with other mobile devices and database servers. You will get to explore the little nuances of .NET Compact Framework programming, and how to get around them using its advanced features. You will also get a firsthand look at how you can use third-party libraries such as the open source Smart Device Framework to add a host of rich functionality to your applications.
Towards the end of this book, you will have accumulated enough understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the .NET Compact Framework and its tools to confidently tackle an enterprise mobile application of any size or complexity.
I hope in the process of getting there you will have as much fun reading this book and trying out the samples as I had writing it.
Chapter 1, CRMLive.NET: An Overview, provides a technical and scope overview of CRMLive.NET, a mobile customer relationship management suite comprising three individual applications (a mobile sales force, mobile dashboard, and mobile support case application).Chapter 1 also outlines the four different mobile client models and a comparison of their strengths and weaknesses.
Chapter 2, Building the Data Tier, shows how a plugin-based data tier based on both the Microsoft SQL Server Compact and Oracle Lite databases can be created using ADO.NET.
Chapter 3, Building the Mobile Sales Force Module, walks the reader through building the logic and presentation tiers of the mobile sales force application, illustrating various concepts along the way such as UI object reusability, validation, paging, record navigation, sorting, and grouping.
Chapter 4, Building Search Functionality, illustrates how full-text search and parameterized-search functionality can be added to the mobile sales force application.
Chapter 5, Building Integrated Services, illustrates how the sales force application can make use of the .NET Compact Framework and P/Invoke calls to access underlying Windows Mobile operating system and mobile device functionality such as the Bluetooth, Infrared, Calendar, and Telephony services.
Chapter 6, Data Synchronization, covers one of the most important topics in the book—the process of data synchronization between the mobile device and the remote database. In this chapter, we will look at how the sales force application can perform bidirectional synchronization using Microsoft SQL Server Compact's SQL RDA and Oracle Lite's mSync technologies.
Chapter 7, Optimizing for Performance, illustrates how the sales force application's performance can be measured and improved using various techniques such as data caching and data compression.
Chapter 8, Securing the Application, covers the various ways to secure locally stored data on the mobile device. It also covers the various authentication mechanisms available during data synchronization with the remote database.
Chapter 9, Globalization, illustrates how the reader can globalize the sales force application to intrinsically support double-byte (Unicode) languages.
Chapter 10, Building the Dashboard, walks the reader through the building of the second application in CRMLive.NET—the mobile dashboard. It will cover the use of stateless asynchronous web service calls to retrieve XML-based data from a remote server.
Chapter 11, Building the Support Case System, walks the reader through the building of the third application in CRMLive.NET—the mobile support case application. It will cover how a messaging backbone based on Microsoft Messaging Queue (MSMQ) technology can be built to support disconnected-state messaging between two remote applications.
Chapter 12, Testing and Debugging, looks at how the tools provided in the PowerToys for .NET CF 3.5 suite can assist in the testing and debugging process of the CRMLive.NET application.
Chapter 13, Packaging and Deployment, walks through the packaging and deployment process of the CRMLive.NET application and how a network-aware, automated update service can be created to assist in the deployment of application upgrades.