The building blocks: The .NET compact framework libraries

2.7 CHALLENGES AHEAD

Although the .NET Compact Framework solves many mobile development problems, it does not completely solve some particularly interesting development areas. These are the challenges that application mobility and distributed networks present.

One interesting and compelling problem the .NET Compact Framework will continue to pursue through future releases is increasingly better adoption of mobilephone-specific technology. The types of functionality specific to mobile phones include using text messages as a data transport between devices. Also, network conditions over which devices—especially mobile phones—must communicate typically tend to be more transient and unreliable than traditional, permanently connected PCs. Other interesting areas of development, however, do not completely pertain to the implementation of the .NET Compact Framework but rather to the challenges presented by application mobility and distributed networks in general.

Another important area where the .NET Compact Framework will strive to add value is in implementing and abstracting the ever-emerging relevant standard protocols for sending data, messages, and services to mobile devices over the network. Today, it is difficult to move data to devices regardless of the particular network the device is on, because simply addressing a device that changes an IP address is frequently challenging. Because mobile devices inherently have some of the greatest networking requirements, they will be a strong testing ground for APIs that support programming to these standards.

Finally, .NET Compact Framework development will continue to extend into other form factors of devices. While the majority of development with the .NET Compact Framework is likely to be on PDAs and high-level mobile phones, other types of devices will come into focus as demand grows for a rich

Because mobile devices inherently have some of the greatest networking requirements, they will be a strong testing ground for APIs that support programming to these standards.

development environment that is efficient for programming. This presents perhaps the biggest challenge to the .NET Compact Framework’s future development—to maximize portability of applications and programming skills among different device form factors without compromising the ability of applications to exploit the unique and powerful resources for each of these different platforms and form factors. Developers will want to minimize the differences between similar applications for maintenance reasons. However, applications that run identically on all form factors of devices do not take full advantage of any of those platforms, so they do not give end users the most dynamic application experience. Providing the right level of abstraction of common features has been—and will continue to be—one of the greatest challenges, minimizing development efforts and maximizing end-user experiences.

ith its release in early 2003, the .NET Compact Framework will give devices the functionality that developers have come to expect from modern, safe PC environments. The .NET Compact Framework replicates this functionality so well that at a source-code level, it is often impossible to tell whether the code was written for a PC running the .NET Framework or a mobile phone running the .NET Compact Framework. The .NET Compact Framework lets developers take existing code and investment in an application built for a PC and, with little modification, run it on a variety of smart devices. It also lets devices participate in network architectures on parity with other machines by letting them easily consume XML Web services, display and process data locally, and synchronize data back into the original source. The ultimate goal is to open an entirely new opportunity for software developers worldwide, letting them efficiently create solutions in the new and exciting realm of mobile applications.

In 1997, several wireless-phone manufacturers organized an industry group called the Wireless Application Protocol forum. This group defined the WAP specification in the form of a long, describes technical document series that defines standards for implementing wireless-network applications. Hundreds of industries strongly supported the WAP forum for standardization to help the technology become widely adopted.

Unfortunately, most of the enthusiasm surrounding WAP has evaporated owing to inherently low channel bandwidth, increased round-trip delays, and a lack of security. WAP technology is primitive and still evolving, and its future depends on how quickly it can improve the transfer rate and effectively enhance its business model.