Wireless and mobile solutions are becoming an important focus for many companies. As a Visual FoxPro developer, you can extend your existing applications to expose information to be rendered on these mobile devices. Building applications for mobile devices mirrors how applications are written for the desktop. When developers build desktop applications today, they use server development or client development to create the desktop experience. Therefore, you have a user interface that is projected from a server or a user interface that runs on the client. The client can be either a browser or a rich client.
The Compact Framework is the client version. It's just like a Visual FoxPro application that runs on a desktop. The Compact Framework enables the development of rich-client applications with controls that are run on the device. You get integration with assets on the operating system, whether it's the capability to make phone calls directly inside your applications or integrating with Pocket PC assets, such as SQL Server CE and Pocket Outlook. You can also write applications that work offline because the code actually lives on the device.
ASP.NET Mobile Controls, formerly called the Mobile Internet Toolkit (MMIT) as an add-on to Visual Studio .NET 2002, are integrated with the Visual Studio .NET 2003 development environment including a PocketPC emulator utility. ASP.NET Mobile Controls allow developers to create Web pages and content that easily targets various types of mobile devices, including mobile phones, PDAs, and pagers. Not only are ASP.NET Mobile Controls integrated within Visual Studio .NET 2003, they also act as an extension to the core ASP.NET development toolset. This white paper focuses on how to build mobile solutions for servers using the ASP.NET Mobile Controls that build upon applications written using Visual FoxPro.