iPhone web app development in ASP.NET - where to begin?

Question

For iPhone web app development in ASP.NET, where do I begin?

I'm considering using ASP.NET MVC, but how do I get started? Are there any weird caveats I should be aware of?

Looks like these might be good resources:

• Mix: Mobile Web Sites with ASP.NET MVC and the Mobile Browser Definition File
• Rock the iPhone with ASP.NET MVC

Answer 1

I highly recommend the second link, ASP.NET MVC and iUI make things pretty easy.

Our first pass at developing apps for the iPhone took forever trying to get everything looking pretty, but those tools make things pretty simple.

We did run into a problem pretty quick though where the size of the site outgrew the simplicity of MVC, so we implemented this "areas" concept from Phil Haack's blog. That made our site pretty scalable.

Also, TEST WITH SAFARI. If you try to develop for IE or FireFox you'll end up recoding the whole thing so it looks nice on the iPhone.

Answer 2

I do things for myself for iPhone in ASP.Net and so far the most important trick for me was setting the viewport meta tag to the width of the screen if the page is accessed by iPhone.

This article link text also describes some other little neat tricks, but I did not need any of that for my particular applications.

Answer 3

I've used the BlackBaud iPhone Simulator and iUi. You can see it live in the NerdDinner.com application by visiting it on an iPhone. I have a writeup on how to do Mobile ASP.NET MVC development here.

Answer 4

Pluralsight has an iPhone ASP.NET Fundamentals course in the On-Demand! training library.

http://www.pluralsight.com/main/olt/Course.aspx?n=iphone-aspdotnet

Here's a link to a Guest Pass. You can view the first few clips of each module.

https://www.pluralsight.com/main/olt/subscribe/requestguestpass.aspx

If you want a longer trial, email me at [email protected] and I'll hook you up.

Meagon