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Goin' Mobile With MMIT
by Patrick Meader
September 2002 Issue
The Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit (MMIT) is to the impending Compact Framework what ASP/ASP.NET is to desktop Visual Studio development. That's a good thing for you as a developer. Microsoft actually groups MMIT under ASP.NET. Like ASP and ASP.NET, MMIT depends on server-based extensions interacting with IIS to kick down HTML to browsers on portable devices, whether Pocket PC devices, Palm OS devices, or Web-enabled mobile phones.
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Patrick Meader
Editor in Chief |
What do you think of the Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit or Microsoft's mobile strategy in general? Discuss this with me in the Talk.Editors forum on our Web site. Use this Locator+ code: VS0209EN_D
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This has all the pluses and minuses you'd expect. The Compact Framework lets you create standalone applications that you install and run on portable devices such as Pocket PC, Pocket PC Phone, and the upcoming Smartphone, whereas MMIT requires that your device have an active connection to the Internet before you can use an MMIT-based application. It also goes without saying that you can create far richer applications using the Compact Framework on Pocket PC and related devices than you can using HTML through a browser—much as you can create richer standalone apps on Windows than going through a Web interface.
The biggest drawback to the Compact Framework is that it targets Pocket PC and related devices exclusively. You can't target Palm devices with it, and you can't target mobile phones that aren't Pocket PC-enabled. That's significant because Sun and its various Java partners have done a much better job getting Java into mobile phones and other mobile devices than Microsoft has to date. You can already buy Java-enabled phones from Nokia, Motorola, and many others. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Compact Framework-enabled Smartphone technology remains on the horizon, due later this year or early next, and the first iteration won't even ship with the .NET runtime for Pocket PC.
Ninety percent of winning is showing up, the adage goes, but Microsoft is late to the game in the arena of programmable mobile phones. The reasons aren't really important—it might be because mobile phone companies, like set-top box companies before them, avoided alliances with Microsoft because they feared being vulnerable to an embrace-and-extend strategy. The fact remains: Mobile-device manufacturers have been slow to embrace Microsoft-authored programming languages in mobile phones, whether it's .NET, Visual Basic .NET, or something else.
On the positive side, Microsoft appears to be doing better in the area of PDA-style mobile devices after getting off to a slow start. Its Pocket PC technology continues to mature and improve at a terrific clip, both in terms of its basic functionality and in the way Microsoft has streamlined its interface for the end user. Better still, VB.NET developers will have a much more comfortable experience under the Compact Framework than when using pre-.NET versions of VB to program mobile devices.
Microsoft's recent Pocket PC advances notwithstanding, corporate environments still face a mix of wireless Pocket PC and Palm-based PDAs for the foreseeable future. Unless a company standardizes on one or the other, it cannot create client-side applications for both sets of devices with a single code base. And no company wants to create the same application twice. Some companies do standardize on one or the other, but as often as not, employees buy the devices they prefer on an ad-hoc basis, leading to a highly heterogeneous mobile PDA environment. This is where MMIT shines. MMIT lets you target a wide range of portable devices with a single set of source. You can target a range of computer desktops and devices from a single application. A computer has different capabilities than a PDA, which has different capabilities than a mobile phone, which has different capabilities than a BlackBerry or other wireless pager. All these devices have different form factors, and it doesn't make sense to present the same UI to all the users of these various devices. MMIT lets you create a single form/application that targets all these devices, and you can have the IDE warn you when a given feature exceeds the capabilities of a device you're targeting, letting you making adjustments as necessary.
And this, for me, is why MMIT is what .NET is all about. It lets you target the users you need to target—whatever devices they might be using, wherever they might be using them—without having to standardize on a particular mobile device. Yes, you trade off some functionality, but the world you can target expands tremendously. It's a chance to realize the promise of the Web all over again. Back to top
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