Line of Business Solution Accelerator 2008

Many development teams have overlooked the original Line of Business Solution Accelerator (released in 2006), spending hours or days developing their own solutions when they could have been on the fast track to success with the pre-built and best-practice focused code available for mobile applications that the LOB accelerator provided.

The updated Microsoft Windows Mobile Line of Business Solution Accelerator for 2008 brings a new round of innovative updates and solid best-practices to the Windows Mobile Platform, showcasing many of the new features released in the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 and SQL Server Compact 3.5. This sample Line of Business application features a set of sample projects, thousands of lines of commented, easy-to-understand code, and an updated Supply Chain application that brings all the concepts together into a working model. Aimed at developers and teams who need to utilize the Windows Mobile platform to its fullest in consumer or enterprise applications, this update to the LOB Solution Accelerator provides all the tools, concepts, and best-practices to get on the fast track to success. Best of all, you can quickly adapt the whole application, or select only those components you want to use. Some of the most exciting features of this release are:

• Intelligent Resolution Awareness
• LINQ
• Managed Stored Procedures and Triggers
• Sync Services for ADO.NET
• WCF Store and Forward
• MapPoint
• Notifications and Online Help
• Language Switching and Localization

Intelligent resolution awareness

As the Windows Mobile marketplace continues to expand, there has been an ever-changing variety of screen sizes and input methods brought to market. We continue to see screen and keyboard dimensions shrink to meet the demand for compact devices, right alongside the huge screens and innovative interfaces on devices that compete with UMPCs or niche market devices. The amazing variety provided to the marketplace has also come with a development cost that seems to nag many applications: orientation and platform awareness. Missing this simple feature can create both extended development times and frustrating failures in the usability of an application.

This latest release of the LOB accelerator comes with the tools necessary to quickly design and build an application that can be compiled into a single distributable binary that runs on Standard or Professional versions of Windows Mobile without the need for custom compilations. The code in the LOB accelerator will also allow you to display your application equally well in Portrait or Landscape mode—regardless of the screen dimensions (rectangular or square). In providing a simple resolution to this problem, the LOB accelerator will save hours of fiddling with the display architecture, and let the design teams and developers make sure the application's interface fits the user experience demanded by your customers.

Professional development standards

One of the best-practices evident in the design of the Solution Accelerator and supported by the resolution-aware examples in particular is this: Develop for WM Standard, test on WM Professional. Unless you are fortunate enough to know the single device or specification that your application will (ever) be distributed on, this best-practice belongs in your development process.

Designing and developing for Windows Mobile Standard, with its lack of a touch screen and generally single mode (keyed) input as a basic platform, and then extending the application to function on Windows Mobile Professional at its optimum, provides the greatest flexibility and increases the potential for successful deployment.

Data access in Compact Framework 3.5