Upcoming Changes to ASP.NET 2.0 in Beta 2

Shanku Niyogi mentioned his team has recently completed planning for Beta 2 of ASP . NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. For the Beta 2 release, they will deliver a high quality release with a go live license to enable live deployments.

Mobile Device Adapters for ASP.NET Server Controls

ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 1 introduced a new control adapter architecture that allows any ASP.NET server control to create alternate renderings for other browsers, including mobile devices. They also included adapters for many of our built-in server controls, to allow developers to use them to create mobile web applications. At the same time, Beta 1 deprecated the ASP.NET mobile controls, which were used in ASP.NET 1.x to build mobile web applications.

In Beta 2, they have decided not to deprecate the V1.x mobile controls. They have instead postponed our plans to ship mobile specific adapters for all controls until a later release.

If you plan on writing a mobile web application using ASP.NET 2.0, they recommend that you use the ASP.NET mobile controls, found in System.Web.Mobile.dll.

They have also decided not to specifically certify individual new devices for use with the mobile controls, through our product release and device updates. Instead, they will provide adapters for V1.x mobile controls that render markup compliant with common markup languages – HTML, cHTML, XHTML Mobile Profile, and CHTML – and work on standard browsers. For many applications, these adapters will work out of the box for a variety of devices. If desired, you can fine-tune your application for an individual device by creating a new device profile and writing new adapters as necessary. They will provide a profiling tool and adapter source to help you customize your applications.

They still plan on including the new control adapter architecture in ASP.NET 2.0. You can write control adapters to customize server controls for individual browsers. For example, you can write a control adapter to generate a different rendering for the Calendar control on Internet Explorer.

PhoneLink and ContentPager Controls

The mobile support in ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 1 included two new controls that were intended to supersede two features of the ASP.NET mobile controls: the PhoneLink server control to replace the PhoneCall mobile control, and the ContentPager control to replace the ability of mobile forms to automatically paginate content according to the screen size of the target browser.

Now that they are bringing back the ASP.NET mobile controls, you can implement these features using . To include a link to a phone number in your page, use the System.Web.UI.MobileControls.PhoneCall control. To paginate the contents of your form, use the Paginate property of the System.Web.UI.MobileControls.Form control.

The ContentPager control also allowed developers to paginate the contents of controls for desktop browsers. To create a paginated UI in ASP.NET without the ContentPager control, you can either use a GridView control, which has built-in support for pagination, or extend the DataList control with support for pagination. For an example of a pagination UI on ASP.NET, please refer to the MSDN article Creating a Pager Control for ASP.NET by Dino Esposito.