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by Jon Box.
Original Post: Book Review from Mobile Software Developer's Blog
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Book Review: Building Solutions with the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework
Recently a copy of Building Solutions with the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework: Architecture and Best Practices for Mobile Development by Dan Fox and Jon Box crossed my desk. A huge number of books come across my desk, and this book happened to have arrived as I am also working on a review for Dr. Dobb's Journal on a couple of .NET Compact Framework books. These two books each weigh in at about 1000 pages, while this book is about 400 pages. This is a "small book" in the best sense of the word. Sometimes you want a book that tells you everything about a topic, and other times you just want a book that will give you guidance without the need to cover every detail. This is such a book.
That is not to say that the book does not cover the topic. In some respects, the authors seem to have covered the topics that I care about. For instance, I have been poking around looking for best practices for determining if a Pocket PC is connected to the network. In looking at the two books I am doing for the Dr. Dobb's review as well as another book concerned solely with Pocket PC Networking, I did not find a better explanation of what is required than in this book. I will be looking at sensing connections in upcoming entries.
This is not a book with huge amounts of code, but in general the code that is present is there for a reason, and you will likely find yourself using a fair amount of the code. Especially useful was the fairly large section of the book devoted to synchronizing with remote data. When you come right down to it, often synchronizing data is the biggest problem in any mobile application. Another major area of concern these days is the area of security, and this is also covered as well, both security of the application proper as well as security of communications from the mobile device.
Overall, this is a very good book. Don't be put off by the relatively small size of the book. In this case, good things do come in small packages!
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