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Whidbey Beefs Up Mobile Development
Microsoft's Chris Anderson gives a peek into upcoming Visual Studio 2005 features for devices.
by Ken McNamee

VSLive! San Francisco, March 25, 2004

Watch a 25-minute clip from the keynote session!

Chris Anderson Architect, Windows Client Platform Team

Writing applications for mobile devices has come a long way. Mobile devices themselves have come a long way. As these devices' capabilities increase, so do the requirements for the APIs and development environments that support them. Today at VSLive! in San Francisco, Microsoft Windows Client Platform architect Chris Anderson gave attendees a glimpse of future Visual Studio mobile technologies and equally exciting refinements to existing technologies, preceded by a quick synopsis of the state of mobile application development with Visual Studio .NET 2003.

Mobile application development is easily defined as designing and developing applications that run on mobile devices. However, defining the term "mobile device" is trickier. In the past, mobile devices were limited to PDAs running Windows CE or the Palm OS. These days, mobile devices incorporate everything from PDAs to Smartphones, to Tablet PCs, even to watches. Visual Studio, in coordination with the explosion of different form factors for mobile devices, is evolving to allow developers to create compelling applications and attractive user interfaces for these devices.

With Visual Studio .NET 2003, developers can create applications for just about any existing mobile device, although the capabilities of the IDE are still somewhat limited. You even have database and replication support with SQL Server CE. With Visual Studio 2005, code-named Whidbey, the development possibilities are greatly expanded with enhanced object models, support for message queues, user interface improvements, and a new database engine.

Improvements Big and Small
As demonstrated by Chris Anderson and Ori Amiga, group program manager of the developer division of Microsoft Visual Studio for Devices, one exciting and improved API is the Pocket Outlook Object Model (POOM). Using POOM, Anderson and Amiga filled a combo box with all of a user's contacts in Pocket Outlook and programmatically placed a call to the business phone number of the selected contact—in three lines of code.

User interface design on mobile devices has also been improved. The form designer now supports many more types of devices, and you can even rotate the device within the designer and have the application UI rotate to match the new orientation. Like Windows Forms developers, mobile device developers will be able to dock controls to one side of the screen or another, or fill up the entire available space. Anchoring of controls will also be supported.

Another demonstration by Anderson and Amiga centered on the new SmsMessage class which, not surprisingly, allows developers to create interesting applications to send and receive Short Message Service (SMS) messages between mobile devices. In addition to SMS, message queuing is also coming to the mobile device platform.

Mobile SQL Server
Currently mobile devices running some flavor of Windows can also run a tiny version of SQL Server called SQL Server CE. This is changing, both in terms of application and development capabilities as well as in name. Microsoft's new mobile database will be called SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition. If you're familiar with developing for SQL Server CE, you're painfully aware that creating and managing the database on a mobile device is woefully inadequate compared to how you manage a regular SQL Server 2000 database.

As Microsoft's Kevin Collins and Anderson demonstrated, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition, and Visual Studio 2005 will dramatically improve your mobile database development efforts. The new SQL Server Workbench IDE will let you manage a mobile database as easily as a server-based database. You will be able to create a database from your regular development machine, move data down to the newly created mobile database using DTS, and even generate the code that performs these operations so you can include it in your application or installation scripts.

The ability to copy data from a server database to a mobile database easily is a long time coming, but Microsoft also added some extra touches. The synchronization process provides a callback mechanism so you can display a status indicator to the user to keep them apprised of the operation's progress. During development you can also view and edit the execution plan for the DTS operation.

In addition to Pocket PCs, Smartphones and Tablet PCs will also support SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition. With all these new APIs and improvements, mobile application development should significantly pick up steam and eventually even rival Web and Windows Forms. A few years ago, you had only one option when it came to developing connected, data-driven applications: the Web. Now you can choose from an improved Web application model, smart-client Windows Forms, and the ever-improving mobile device platforms.

About the Author
Ken McNamee is a senior software developer with Vertigo Software, a leading provider of software development and consulting services on the Microsoft platform. He previously led a team of developers in rearchitecting the Home Shopping Network's e-commerce site, HSN.com, to 100 percent ASP.NET with C#. Readers can contact him at kenm@vertigosoftware.com.