Web 2.0 ASP.NET

Is just me or does the ASP.NET mobile controls site look a tad moribund these days? Visual studio 2008 saw the removal of the mobile project templates removed from the standard installation and the lack of examples and real world applications really makes development a labor of love.

Noticably in Japan where mobile net usage is astonishingly high, I have literally been laughed at when mentioning the possibility of building sites on the platform.

But even so, I cannot help but think this is due to a lack of unerstanding of the technology. Also, in a market where developers can charge for the development of separate sites for each type of mobile markup, being able to generate a single site which dynamically renders the same content could decrease revenues. But this is a very simplistic view. As devices become more powerful, so do the mobile browsers with support for javascipt and standard xhtml becoming the norm. But there are still many millions of users with very basic phones.

Enter MVC! recently Scott Hanselman published a tutorial using MVC to build a mobile version of the Nerd Dinner sample application for the IPhone and Blackberry. Also Microsoft Ireland have been almost secretly updating the browser caps files to include the latest devices (Ireland being the European hub for all things mobile these days). I really think it would be a crying shame if the ASP.NET mobile controls were to dissolve into obscurity as they are essentially a great idea and although the upkeep could be costly I think it is a great reason for using asp.net as it provides a crossover for web developers to lever their existing knowledge and allow a diverse selection of devices access to essentially the same application.