Mobile Web Sites in ASP.NET

I’ve been working on a mobile-enabled ASP.NET application lately, and overall it seems like pages did best when I

• Used valid XHTML
• Used as few tables & images as possible
• Kept styles & scripting to a minimum & put them in a separate css
• When I wanted to emphasize things I’d use standard tags like h1, h2, em, etc.

Remember that ASP.NET will degrade some of its functionality (e.g. client-side javascript validation) if it thinks the browser can’t handle it. Since mobile browsers have a distinct user agent string, that means they’ll be treated like a very basic web browser by ASP.NET. So you should make sure that your application still works (and looks ok) by using some emulators to test functionality.

Openwave Phone Simulator

Openwave provides a few versions of the Openwave Phone Simulator that lets you see how your site performs on the Openwave Mobile Browser. It’s pretty easy to install — log in, download the simulator, run it, & type in the URL you want to surf. Note that there are different versions of the simulator based on the browser version to want to emulate. So you can check this list of phones, see which version of the Openwave browser they use, & then get the matching Simulator version. So yes you’re probably gonna be downloading at least 5.1, 6.2.2, and 7.0.

Generic devices on the Openwave Simulator version 7.0 (left) and version 6.2.2 (right):

Windows Mobile Device Emulator

You can also use the Windows Mobile Device Emulator to emulate Pocket PC & Windows CE devices. Note that to use it easily you’ll also want to install the Virtual Machine Network Driver and ActiveSync 4.2. Then reboot, even if it doesn’t prompt you to.

Then in order to surf the web with your emulated mobile device, you

• Open up Device Emulator Manager
• Right-click an Emulated Phone & click Connect
• Once the phone fires up, go into Device Emulator Manager, right-click the same phone and click Cradle.
• After a few seconds, ActiveSync will open up & ask you what kind of connection to create. Choose a Guest connection.
• Then you should be able to open up Internet Explorer on the emulated phone & surf around. You can type using your keyboard and navigate around the page using the arrow keys (on your keyboard).

Smartphone 2003 SE device profile on Windows Mobile Device Emulator: