Creating mobile applications is easy with ASP.NET mobile controls from Microsoft (http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/list/netdevmit.asp). In this article, learn to create mobile applications that target a variety of mobile browsers with very little development effort. If you are new to wireless development, this is an excellent primer for developing a simple "Hello World" page to a full fledged portal application.

In the past, we typically relied on XML and XSLT to create sites that needed to target multiple client platforms. Take XML data, pump it into an XSL document and allow it to produce the correct markup output for the exact device(s) with which we felt our target market would be viewing the site. This was extremely cumbersome because even though many devices claimed to target a specific markup language version, we quickly noticed that many actually failed to do so. Thus, the programmer was forced to perform a bunch of browser checks, making sure they targeted correct versions and outputted the correct markup for that browser and device. With ASP.NET mobile controls, Microsoft doesn't want the average developer to be concerned with the specific device or markup standard. The company wants the developer to focus solely on creating the application.

I will assume that you have downloaded and installed the Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit 1.0, the Device Updates, and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET (VS .NET). In order to test different devices, it is also recommended to download and install the Openwave SDK 6.1 (at the time of publication I had too many problems with 6.2, so I chose 6.1 for all of the testing I will do for this article). The SDK can be downloaded from http://developer.openwave.com/resources/sdk.html. If you do plan on using the Openwave client with VS .NET, take a look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnmitta/html/mmit_openwave.asp. This describes how to setup VS .NET to work directly with the Openwave emulator. Another emulator to consider testing your mobile pages with is the Pocket PC emulator from Microsoft http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/downloads/list/pocket2002.asp.

Let's start with the basics of the mobile development experience by creating a simple "Hello World" page. Then we will create a simple control. These simple concepts also will be applied to creating an entire portal. Included is a basic administration application for the portal, which you can dissect to see exactly how it works.

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