Microsoft Mobile Development Handbook

I just ordered this book – next day delivery.

This sounds like exactly what I’ve been looking for; clear, straight forward information about developing .net mobile applications with database connectivity.

From what I have learned on forums and internets, Microsoft really screwed developers on the mobile-to-database issue by taking away the OLE drivers – which removed the simplicity of a one-to-one connection. Now developers are forced to work with a convoluted design which forces data to be written to a database on the mobile – and to then later (when the mobile has a LAN connection) upload to the actual database via SQL CE. It also appears that Microsoft made sure that developers would not be able to connect to an Access database (I hope I’m wrong about that).

Warning:

that last paragraph is very likely completely wrong. But for now, that’s my understanding of the scope of the problem.
The web is full of unfinished thoughts and partial ideas about solutions – which complicate the issue mulit-fold. I doubt seriously that I will blog about snappy solutions or easy answers to database connectivity via mobile problem. I might be – hope to be – wrong about that. If so, I’ll be happy to be another blogger reporting about how easy it all is and that all you need to do is use the SQL CE namespace.

I contacted the SQL admin at the company who is hosting our SQL 2000 database at work. He didn’t know anything about SQL CE and had no idea why I would have any problems connecting directly to our SQL db. I tried – many times – many variations.

I talked with my SQL (a SQL guru) teacher who said something like the following (wincing and gesturing to illustrate her frustration with the subject):
Just forget about it. databases on mobile devices are still two to three years away from being worked out or do-able. there are only a very few people in this country who are doing mobile development and they are getting paid more than any other software developer because their skills are so rare.

To summarize:

There is a lot of confusion on the web revolving around database connectivity from mobile devices. It’s darn near impossible to get a straight, dependable lead from blogs or forums and there is very little current help to be found in books. (that last thing is particularly astounding given the proliferation of hand held devices all around the world.)

I expect that the only way to penetrate the exclusive skull-and-bones-like club of mobile-to-database connectivity is to just buy the book.

I’ll post thoughts on things in a few days after getting my hands on it reading the database chapters.