ASP.net mobile application development

Question

I have an existing website for schools and colleges management which is developed in ASP.NET,C# and SQL Server.

Now I am planning to support for the mobile applications (like basic models from Nokia/Samsung and for opera mobiles). I know the normal site we can access through some of the devices without any change, but needs to be optimized.

I am preparing another version which will be only few required fields and easy navigation for mobile. For that which method I need to use.

1. Normal ASPX files with optimized HTML code.
2. Or using WAP controls
3. Should I use HTML 5

Please help me to decide.

Answer 1

I recommend using the HTML5 templates(includes Modernizer) that come with ASP.NET MVC 3 and the jQuery Mobile framework. Let the jQuery Mobile framework do all the multi-device heavy lifting for you.

jQuery Mobile Supported Devices

Answer 2

1. you can use normal aspx pages without any issue. only thing you need to optimize the file size.
2. you can develop better solution using HTML5 but only problem is, it is not supporting all the devices.this is used html5
3. or just use any from List of mobile frameworks

Answer 3

You can use normal ASP.NET Web Forms in conjunction with HTML5. Take a look at HTML5Boilerplate which includes Modernizr.

Use a combination of feature detection and CSS Media Queries to serve up the appropriate files, layout and images for a particular mobile device.

Do not fall for "Responsive Web Design" techniques that cost too much in terms of performance and esthetics (basically re-skinning desktop browser version of site and calling it "mobile-ready"); disclosure: this links to blog post from me.

Answer 4

Use ASP.NET Mobile Controls: ASP.NET Mobile Controls .. (i.e. How to add mobile pages to your asp.net site)

• You will build a few UI controls, in a short amount of time, specifically for all mobile devices and it will be a much faster and much better user experience on mobile devices.
  • The UI renders minimal HTML and you control what gets rendered, meaning much less bandwidth required. Even though I have a 4G phone, so many times we are in a building that does not give a 4G signal and I much prefer sites that have mobile-specific output.
  • The UI is mobile-specific, users will not have to zoom around the page left/right up/down and zoom in to be able to click buttons or elements that were made for viewing in 1024x768 or higher.

Users with the latest 4G and dual core phones, and that happen to have 4G connection at the moment can always switch their phones into 'full HTML version' if they want more functionality than what you build using the ASP.NET mobile controls. However, if you go the other route and adopt JQuery-based or HTML5 code, you are excluding all previous generation phones from accessing your web site at all in many cases (besides it being slower and not as good a user experience as mobile-specific rendering). Even if you decide to focus only on the latest phones, you will also have to deal with html rendering issues, cross browser compatibility, besides the slow and UI complexity issues.

Good luck.

Answer 5

Using .NET Mobile Framework is always a good option as well as Web Forms which will appear on all mobile devices regardless of carrier/phone model, plus lots of phones support ajax, and other client side scripting that'll work. HTML5 is a growing standard though, and when more phones start supporting it, you'll reap tons of the new benefits.

Model View Controller is always good to follow. Allows for scalability and for components to be abstracted.