MSDN Briefing about Windows Mobile + SQL Server Mobile
Yesterday I was hosting an MSDN Briefing in Vienna.
MSDN Briefings are monthly events targetting software developers. The topics, which are adressed cover currently released technologies.
This time the title was "Under the hoods of Windows Mobile 5 + Offline Applications with SQL Server Mobile Edition".
I did one session about new features of Windows Mobile 5 API:
- With Pocket Outlook Object Model (POOM) you can access Pocket Outlook calendar appointments, tasks and contacts and integrate these into your own applications. You can also send sms and emails and intercept them as they arrive on the device.
- State and Notification Broker allows querying system states and getting notified if a state changes (possible states are e.g. batterystate, number of current calendar appointments, network connection count, ...).
- Phone API can start outgoing calls.
- Standard dialogs (CameraCaptureDialog, ChooseContactDialog, SelectPictureDialog) wellknown from Windows Mobile can now be leveraged from your application.
In the other session I introduced the two possibilities for synchronizing SQL Server Mobile with SQL Server 2005.
- Remote Data Access (RDA) - is the lightweight way. It needs no changes on the server side, but can only do simple PUSH and PULL calls (or server side command execution). Replication of constraints or indices is not supported. Changes on the server side are not tracked, so the client has to pull down the entire data (tablewise) from the server every time, can make the changes locally and then push back only the changes.If two clients update the server at the same time the last one overrules the previous - so data conflicts can occur.
- Merge Replication provides more features - e.g. replication of several tables at once, including primary/foreign key constraints and indices, bi-directional change-tracking for incremental transfer, data reconcilation at the server side to prevent conflicts - at the cost of server changes to tables and columns and more overhead.
You can download the session slides from the first session (Windows Mobile API) as attachment to this posting (second one in the next posting due to upload limits).
As promised I will record all demos as soon as possible and publish them also in response to this post.
After the event several people asked me questions about Bluetooth, MAPI, Audio Recording,... with Windows Mobile. I will post answers to these as comments to this post (see below).