Inside the ASP.NET Mobile Controls

ASP.NET comprises controls, components, and tools to help you build mobile Web applications rapidly for multiple types of wireless devices — without writing code that is structured for a specific device. ASP.NET Mobile Web Forms support mobile devices and recognize and adaptively provide appropriate rendering for a variety of mobile devices.

You can also create new mobile controls using the user control in the .NET Framework. Device manufacturers or independent software vendors (ISVs) can add support for new devices; or they can customize controls to take advantage of unique features on specific devices by writing their own control adapters. For more information about ASP.NET mobile Web Forms user controls and writing your own control adapters, see Creating Custom Mobile Controls.

Extensibility

ASP.NET mobile Web Forms and mobile controls offer the same extensibility features available in ASP.NET, and add support for working with multiple devices. Specifically, ASP.NET mobile Web Forms and mobile controls provide the following kinds of extensibility:

  • You can write new mobile controls and use them in an ASP.NET mobile Web Forms page. New controls can employ inheritance or composition to take advantage of existing controls.
  • You can use ASP.NET user controls to write simple mobile controls declaratively.
  • You can customize the output of any control on a device-specific basis by adding a new adapter for the control.
  • You can add support for an entirely new device by using adapter extensibility, with no changes to individual applications.

ASP.NET Mobile Controls

A developer can create ASP.NET mobile Web Forms pages consisting of controls either in the ASP.NET Mobile Designer or with any text editor. Many of the controls are similar to desktop controls in Web Forms and to GUI controls in other programming languages, such as Microsoft Visual Basic. For example, the Label and TextBox controls mimic the behavior of the Web Forms' Label and TextBox controls and the corresponding controls in Visual Basic.

The following mobile controls are available in the ASP.NET page framework:

AdRotator

Calendar

Command

CompareValidator

CustomValidator

Form

Image

Label

Link

List

MobilePage

ObjectList

Panel

PhoneCall

RangeValidator

RegularExpressionValidator

RequiredFieldValidator

SelectionList

StyleSheet

TextBox

TextView

ValidationSummary