Hello,
I am new to Mobile specific website development. I want to know does Visual Studio provides way to create a web site which can be targeted to mobile devices? Also can this website be run on phones running on OS other than Windows OS like iPhone, Android or slimier other OS?
My aim is to develop a website which can be targeted to phone running on any OS. Does Visual Studio and .NET can be used for this purpose?
If yes then can someone provide me some content to start with.
Thanks Paresh
Any phone with a web browser can view a web site, regardless of what technology platform that site is written on. It's one of the best and defining characteristics of the web...
You can certainly code a website for mobile devices with Visual Studio and run it on the .NET platform on IIS (or Mono).
As far as targeting all devices, your man concern should be the UI of the website and how it will render in each phone's browser. I'd recommend an approach of making the site look good for the most popular platforms first (iPhone's Safari, Android's browser), and making it 'good enough' for the rest.
In VS 2010 you should not create seperate website for mobile, but a standard ASP.NET website with pages designed for mobile best output.
Now when you develop a mobile website it is very important from marketing point of view that you share same domain for your standard website as well as mobile website.
For e.g. your standard website domain is www.standard.com, there are two things you can do when any user is browsing this domain from mobile device
1) Detect if request is coming from mobile device redirect user to http://standard.mobi
2) Detect if request is coming from mobile device redirect user to http://www.standard.com/mobile/
Above are two ways of redirecting the user automatically to mobile optimized pages instead of asking user to browse the mobile website.
To achieve above it is very important that you detect the mobile request perfectly.
Please take a look at http://51degrees.codeplex.com. It is an ASP.NET open source module which detects mobile devices and provides auto redirection to mobile optimized pages when request is coming from mobile device. It makes use of WURFL mobile device database. For redirection there is no need to modify existing ASP.NET web application pages.