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You Can Take it With You » ASP.NET AJAX and Windows Mobile - Why?

ASP.NET AJAX and Windows Mobile - Why?

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I received some very nice feedback from my last post yesterday that included a very legitimate point about local apps that harness the web versus extending the web model as one does in the case of AJAX. Honestly, if my goal was to develop Windows Mobile-specific solution then the local app harnessing the web would probably make the most sense.

Here’s just a few random thoughts about my interest in getting ASP.NET AJAX to work with Windows Mobile…

My main interest in getting the ASP.NET AJAX stuff to work is that I'd like to find a solution that is reasonably easy to write that works across both Windows Mobile devices and the desktop. My hope is that once I figure out how to get the ASP.NET UpdatePanel to work on Windows Mobile that I can publish the scripts so that people can start building ASP.NET AJAX sites that'll automatically support both mobile and desktop clients. Hopefully, others may be interested enough to take the scripts even further.

What's funny is that IE Mobile (especially 6.12) provides excellent support for building AJAX-enable sites as long as you're building them manually - which can be painfully time-consuming. On the other hand, ASP.NET AJAX makes building simple AJAX pages trivial. IMHO, it'll be some time before IE Mobile supports ASP.NET AJAX out-of-the-box. The IE Mobile DOM is currently just missing too many things. A near-term solution, even if limited in power, is needed.

I don't want to see the ASP.NET AJAX story evolve too far without considering where mobile devices fit in. I'm hoping that by publishing mobile-enabled version of the ASP.NET AJAX script files that at least a few people will start including Widows Mobile as a target of some of their sites. This'll hopefully lead to Microsoft getting some feedback on the ASP.NET AJAX mobile experience.

As we all know, some solutions are best solved on the web (and many are best solved locally), I'd like to see more of those apps that are best suited for the web provide mobile users with the speed and convenience of the AJAX experience without requiring devs to manually wire everything up. For now ASP.NET AJAX seems to be one of the best choices for that.

All that said, this may be a fool’s errand J

Posted Sep 21 2007, 10:58 AM by jim-wilson

Comments

Richard Jones wrote re: ASP.NET AJAX and Windows Mobile - Why?
on 09-21-2007 11:27 AM
I'm with you all the way on this.

I've been doing a fair bit on mobile AJAX on Windows Mobile 6 (and blogging about it).

I share your pain, and your joy when it all works.

Isn't Javascript just SUCH fun to debug. :-)

Richard
Jim wrote re: ASP.NET AJAX and Windows Mobile - Why?
on 09-21-2007 11:40 AM
Jim,

You are a saint and a martyr (or does martyr go first, but I digress).

But you have things completely backwards... You plainly state that IE Mobile 6.12 supports AJAX out of the box, as long as you hand code your AJAX. The ASP.NET AJAX toolkit is supposed to be "the" cross platform toolkit for creating AJAX style applications within the Microsoft development environment. And yet they clearly do not support IE Mobile. Shame on them.

I think that it is quite valiant that you are working so hard to make the ASP.NET AJAX toolkit work on mobile devices, but since the team that built this toolkit has overstated its usefulness, it would appear to be their problem and they should correct it. In short, it is not the IE Mobile browser that needs to be corrected, but rather the ASP.NET AJAX toolkit that should be corrected.
Jim Wilson wrote re: ASP.NET AJAX and Windows Mobile - Why?
on 09-21-2007 11:44 AM
Richard;

Agreed on all fronts.

Jim
Jim Wilson wrote re: ASP.NET AJAX and Windows Mobile - Why?
on 09-21-2007 12:06 PM
Jim;

You're point is well taken.

In all honesty, I think they (Atlas team and IE Mobile team) share the responsibility as it appears that neither includes the other as part of their test suite.

- Jim
navot wrote re: ASP.NET AJAX and Windows Mobile - Why?
on 09-22-2007 5:20 AM
I would like to draw your attention to a paradigm change, but first let me say it out loud, I am not, and do not pretend to be objective. Judge for yourselves. VWG is a platform that allows window programming, deploying with an empty client concept. No-data, no logic client, no plug-in, just pure browser. Very effective protocol enables payloads of up to 1 kb, a new approach that could change the mobile programming arena. Have a look. www.visualwebgui.com
Jim Wilson wrote re: ASP.NET AJAX and Windows Mobile - Why?
on 09-23-2007 4:14 PM
navot;

The Visual WebGui (VWG) solution looks interesting. I poked around the site a bit but didn't see much discussion of the details of targeting mobile devices (Windows Mobile, et. al.).

Is there a resource available that talks about the DOM expectations that VWG has for mobile devices? I'd really like to understand more about this solution.

In many cases, client requirements mandate that I still do a lot of my work with ASP.NET. However there may be some scenarios where I might have the option of using alternative solutions such as VWG.

Thanks,
Jim

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