Executive Summary

Today we are witnessing an explosion in the use of mobility in both our personal and work lives. In the years ahead most workers will rely on mobility every day, whether on the road or in a typical office environment.

As a result, people will need to access information anywhere, anytime, and on any device. This includes corporate infrastructure (e-mail and calendaring), custom line-of-business applications, and information that exists in packaged horizontal applications. Workers also need to access the information when disconnected from the corporate network, as well as when using devices that function in connected and occasionally connected modes. In addition, there is a vast array of devices from PDAs to wireless Web phones that architects and developers must consider when architecting their solutions.

This book concentrates on a subset of that entire picture by focusing primarily on architecting line-of-business applications for PDAs using the Microsoft Windows .NET Compact Framework.

Microsoft has a history with mobility stretching back over ten years, most of it squarely centered on the Windows CE operating system. The .NET Compact Framework and Smart Device Projects (SDP) for Visual Studio .NET 2003 target Pocket PC 2000, 2002, and embedded Windows CE .NET 4.1 platforms. This toolset produces managed code using a subset of either Visual Basic (VB) .NET or Visual C# .NET that is executed by a common language runtime analogous to the desktop Microsoft Windows .NET Framework.