Chapter 34. Mobile Applications

In the past, building applications for mobile phones or PDAs was not for the fainthearted. It required not only a special set of tools but also a great deal of patience to get everything to work properly. The .NET Compact Framework — a smaller, limited-feature subset of the full .NET Framework available for Windows Mobile devices, and the associated designer support within Visual Studio — opened up the world of mobile application development to the general developer community. Once it was released, developers could build, test, and deploy applications just as they did Windows applications.

In Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 this experience continues to improve, with richer designer support and a complete set of controls for building applications. This chapter shows you how easy it is to build and test device applications within Visual Studio 2008. In this chapter you'll notice references to the .NET Framework — zunless we specify otherwise, we're referring to the .NET Compact Framework.

Programming for mobile applications is all about optimizing the small-form factor, the mobility, and the unique functionality offered by these devices. The second part of this chapter looks at some more advanced techniques for building mobile applications, including rich support for building data applications and the new functionality offered by the Windows Mobile API.