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Mobilizing with .NET - An introduction
and case study overview
There has been a good deal of hype surrounding
Microsoft's .NET (pronounced dot net) over the last few
months. The .NET initiative encompasses such a wide range
of new technologies that it can be difficult to understand
how it relates to your particular business or product and
how you can leverage it. In this article, I will provide
an introduction to what .NET means for developers of mobile
software and a look at what other business are already doing
with it. In this article, each mobile .NET strategy will
be covered, but the focus will be on the Microsoft Mobile
Internet Toolkit (MMIT), which is already available as a
free
download from Microsoft.
For software developers, .NET provides
4 key advancements over the popular development tool Visual
Studio 6.0.
- the programming languages (C# and
Visual Basic.NET),
- the purely object oriented software
engineering paradigm,
- the unified set of development tools
for all languages, and
- the object library shared by all
languages.
While each of these features deserves
its own discussion, it is beyond the scope of this document.
However, it is important to understand these advancements
because they all carry over into the realm of developing
software for mobile devices.
As shown in Table 1, Microsoft has come
up with two strategies developers can use to leverage .NET
in mobile applications. The first strategy is called the
".NET Compact Framework (.NETcf) and Smart Device Extensions
(SDE)." This is a Visual Studio.NET add-on which allows
developers to create code which can be compiled and run
on operating systems such as Pocket PC and Windows CE.NET
using the C# (C sharp) or Visual Basic.NET languages, along
with a direct subset of the .NET object library. The .NETcf
and SDE is currently at the Beta 1 stage and is available
for download by MSDN subscribers. The key benefit of using
this technology is simply that code written for desktop
applications can be easily ported to run on mobile devices
since both desktop and mobile applications are built using
the same language, tools, and object library. The downside
of this approach is that the mobile devices must include
the .NETcf runtime code. These runtimes are expected to
be included in the ROM of future devices, but for the current
devices, the runtime must be downloaded and installed. Currently
this is approximately 2.1 MB, but the size is expected to
drop slightly when the final version of .NETcf and SDE is
released. Given that most mobile devices come with a minimum
of 32MB this 2.1 MB runtime is not an extraordinary memory
consumer.
Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit
Because
.NETcf and SDE are still in the beta testing stage, the
remainder of this article will focus on the mobile strategy
available through .NET which is has already been released.
This approach is called the "Microsoft Mobile Internet
Toolkit (MMIT)." Simply put, MMIT is an extension
to ASP.NET (Active Server Pages), which, through Microsoft's
IIS server software, allows web applications to be accessed
by just about any internet-enabled mobile device. MMIT 1.0
is available as a free download from Microsoft but a license
to Visual Studio.NET is recommended to help you get the
most out of it. Additionally, developers should have a background
of managing IIS servers, developing ASP.NET applications,
and programming in a .NET-enabled language such as C#. The
key to MMIT is that it runs entirely from your IIS web server
and the applications developed with it are accessed by users
exclusively over internet or intranet connections. Because
of this server-side architecture, there are no requirements
for end users aside from having some sort of network connection
and web browsing software. While this requires that the
mobile device be connected to the internet, Microsoft and
other's believe that wireless technology will soon allow
such an occurrence to be common place, either via cellular
communications or 802.11x wireless networks. Essentially,
when a user's mobile device connects to a MMIT web application,
the server first discovers technical information about the
user's device hardware, web browsing software, and network
connection speed. Based on this information, MMIT works
its magic by transforming your application into a form best
suited for that particular device. MMIT takes care of correctly
rendering an application for the markup language (HTML,
WML, or cHTML), web browsing software, and screen size of
each mobile device that connects to the application.
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