The Mobile Internet – ASP.NET Mobile Controls
While many modern mobile phones are adopting desktop-like browsing experience including Windows Mobile 6.1.4 and the recently announced WM 6.5, web developers may still want to create web sites tailored for mobile device use. ASP.NET does provide support for device-specific rendering in the ASP.NET Mobile Controls but first some background so that you can get up and running in Visual Studio 2008.
The Mobile Internet Toolkit was released as an add-on to ASP.NET 1.0 with great fanfare. It was rolled into ASP.NET 1.1 as part of the framework. The ASP.NET Mobile Controls have not changed much since ASP.NET 1.1. Here is the landing page for the mobile controls:
In Visual Studio 2008, the mobile internet web site and form templates were removed due to incompatibility with the new design-time model in VS 2008. This blog post provides a download that allows you to add the Mobile Web Form and Mobile Web Configuration File under “My Templates” in the “Add New Item” Wizard.
Back in the ASP.NET 1.1 days, I co-authored a book titled Building ASP.NET Server Controls. As part of the effort, I authored two chapters on the mobile controls. One chapter provides an overview on control customization. The second chapter covers how to author device-specific mobile controls. The chapters in near final form can be downloaded here in case you are looking for more information on the ASP.NET Mobile Controls.