Mobile applications built with .NET?

Question

Can we develop mobile applications using .NET? Which mobiles are supported? Are those applications supported on all mobiles, or any particular mobiles?

Answer 1

You should look at the .NET compact framework. This will allow development of applications on a version of the .NET framework specialized for running on systems with limited resources. Microsoft is also touting the new Windows 7 phone

You can also write for .NET using Mono on the Android operating system according to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/214615/will-google-android-ever-support-net

Answer 2

There are a number of families of phones that support development using .NET.

iOS

You can develop for iOS using MonoTouch. This allows you to crate apps using C# code that looks and smells like usual C# code. Under the covers the code get compiled into chunks of native code, rather into CLR.

Windows Mobile phones

There is a port of Windows.Forms for Windows Mobile. The interface is similar to desktop WinForms.

Windows Phone 7

WinPhone7 deevlopment is 100% managed C# code using either Silverlight(WPF) or XNA Studio(gaming).

Answer 3

Consider writing a web application that exposes views/pages specifically designed for mobile clients.

You could write your application in ASP.NET webforms or MVC, and programatically detect which page/view to best serve to that client.

For some idea on how to make that application look, see Scott Hanselman's 2008 post on the Best Mobile Websites.

Recommended as well to listen to Scott's podcast on ASP.NET and the Mobile Web. They focus their discussion on the Mobile Device Browser File - definitions for individual mobile devices and browsers. At run time, ASP.NET uses the information in the request header to determine what type of device/browser has made the request.

Native apps

Currently, Windows Phone 7 can be developed with Silverlight/XAML with Visual Studio.