Customer Reviews

Building .NET Applications for Mobile Devices

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Although the title says .Net "Applications", it fails to
mention they are "Web" applications, meaning ASP.Net & WML Pages! Good thing I got this book from my U's library rather
than wasting my money on it. I was looking for "apps" that run
on mobile platforms, not "apps that run in a IE window"
on mobile platforms! Although, it has good descriptions
of resources like the various dev toolkits from different cell
phone vendors, there's not much else.

I find the previous review completely in error.

While I'm only 5 chapters into the book, I'm finding it well organized and well written. Additionally, I'm working the examples and I'm finding that the "Mobile Internet Toolkit" technology works well over a variety of device emulators.

Having said this, you must also understand that I am a Microsoft basher, although my mind is open to the .Net technologies.

The only criticism that I have so far is that the examples are tending to be very buggy. This is not a problem for me as I learn lots by fixing them, but some readers will find this frustrating.

#1 I have visual studio .net 2003 so don't waste my time telling me about hardcoding templates and device specific stuff before you go to the easier way. Please go into the details of the code AFTER the easier way.
#2 The entire chapter on list controls and onwards does NOT make sense and is really hard to understand. I have used j2ee and .net and I should not be having so much trouble understanding your work.
#3 please jump into the book rather than why use .net mobile
#4 Templates chapter is arduous to read.
#5 Openwave sdk 6.2 does not work with examples had to read in chapter 8 that you download updates from MS website before the examples work.
#6 don't take till chapter 11 and page 400 to tell me how to connect to the database! don't waste my time with arrays and list controls as "data collections" before you get to db connectivity etc. the entire lists chapters could have been written better.

Is this is a cultural gap? I went through the GCSE O Levels etc. and I KNOW that British authors and British textbooks are awesome , even better than their american counterparts but for this subject I will have to resort to SAMS books to get the details.

To tell the truth, I didn't read the whole book. I was turned off by the market speak right off the bat in chapter one. There's too many other books out there to explore, so please don't waste my time telling me how good .Net technology is; tell me how to use it. If your looking for a good book on Pocket PC programming, check out "Pocket PC, Handheld PC Developer's Guide with Microsoft Embedded Visual Basic". There's a lot of good, concise info in that book.
As a side note, I'm not a Microsoft basher. I make my bread and butter working with their products. I'm just sick of getting sales pitches everwhere I look.