Create Mobile Database Apps

Visual Studio .NET 2003 provides a truly integrated platform for developing mobile applications for the Windows CE and Pocket PC OSs. It also includes SQL Server CE 2.0a mobile version of the traditional SQL Server database platform. Now, you can easily develop enterprise-class mobile applications that access corporate databases.

I'll show you how to use Visual Studio .NET 2003 and SQL Server CE 2.0 to develop a simple contact-management application that runs on a Pocket PC (download the sample code). One of its requirements is that the user can be disconnected, so you'll use SQL Server CE to host a replicated copy of the database on the device. The application synchronizes the local SQL Server CE database with a back-end SQL Server 2000 database when the user connects to the network. You'll learn how to design the back-end database for use with SQL CE 2.0, and how to choose and set up database replication so that remote devices can edit information in parallel. Then, you'll build the application and test it with the .NET Compact Framework emulator and on a Pocket PC device.

The article continues at http://www.fawcette.com/vsm/2003_10/magazine/features/thews/