I had great fun giving Windows Mobile presentations in Prof. Bailey and Liu's MIS 304 classes (VB.Net) today. The slides are available here.
I think it is very well received (see the survey results at the end. Thanks to everyone who completed the survey form). If you want to see more detailed screen shots and explanation on how exactly the example application works, check out my blog entry. To run the example applications yourself, follow these steps:
- Download the PocketPC SDK and Smartphone SDK from the MSDN mobility download site. You can also download additional emulator packages from the same site if you'd like to test your application on more different devices. Just execute the downloaded files and they will be automatically installed into your existing Visual Studio .Net 2003.
- Sign up for Amazon Web Services. They will email you a developer token that you will embed into your VB code when calling Amazon Web Services. You can also download the SDK, which contains documentation of web service.
- Download the source code in the following two VS.Net 2003 solutions: AmazonCheck.zip and AmazonPhone.zip. The reason we need two solutions is that the VB.Net PocketPC and Smartphone projects cannot co-exist in the same solution. (C# is much better in this aspect).
- AmazonCheck/AmazonPocketVB: The complete Amazon Web Services client application in VB.Net on PocketPC devices. It features cache management, automatic network switch and cache persistence.
- AmazonCheck/AmazonLiteVB: The lite version of the Amazon Web Services client we demostrated in class. It is extremely simple and only reuqires 12 lines of code.
- AmazonCheck/AmazonPocketCS: The C# version of the Amazon client. I will continue to improve it to showcase more design patterns etc.
- AmazonPhone/AmazonPhoneVB: The Smartphone version of the client. The cache persistence code is currently not implemented.
Evaluation survey results (sample size of 48 students, on scale from 1 to 5)
| The Speaker was well organized: | 4.88/5.00 |
| Effective example: | 4.88/5.00 |
| Interesting and stimulating content: | 4.81/5.00 |
| Speaker effectiveness: | 4.69/5.00 |
| Relavance of materials: | 4.73/5.00 |
| Overall rating: | 4.79/5.00 |
Scott Beaudreau, an Architectural Consultant with Microsoft, has just started a blog about mobile web services. It is just great to have a window looking into what Microsoft has been up to with the cutting edge mobile web services!
I personally have a strong interest in mobile web services. I published an article on smart client-based mobile web service almost two years ago. Looking back, some of the statements are rather immature -- but I know better now. After that, I published a series of technical articles on this topic based on J2ME/kSOAP, J2ME Web Services spec and .Net CF. (Check out my Vanity Amazon Status MIDlet for a real world app). I also published an IEEE article on the security issues of mobile web services in financial services sector. My consulting work with Nokia has lead me to investigate another whole area of mobile web services discussed in Scott's essay -- Web services interfaces to telecomm services. The Nokia Series 40 blueprint application I developed deal with the Nokia MMS servers. I hope to expand it to presence and other services in the future.
Now after reading Scott's blog entry, I am increasingly convinced that the future of mobile web services is messaging based infrastructure with multimodal support:
1. A device should be able to send a SOAP request as an asynchronous message;
2. The request message is authenticated and authorized at an AC;
3. It is processed by multiple intermediaries and finally forwarded to an end point;
4. The end point processes the request and sends another request to the telecomm service center;
5. The telecomm service center then delivers the results in MMS or voice to the client device.
That is a very appealing end-to-end picture.