ASP.NET 2.0 Mobile Support: It’s Bronze not Gold

Note: this entry has moved.

No, I’m not talking about the 2004 Olympics here.

Like two years ago in a meeting for MVPs ScottGu was presenting an overview of ASP.NET Whidbey. I do remember he told us that ASP.NET support for mobile devices would be a gold key in Whidbey.

The alpha bits were a step further in that direction: the control architecture was revamped in order to allow “adaptation” natively. The days (and problems) of having two separate control architectures were counted.

So with adaptation being supported natively and with every control adaptable out-of-the-box against any of the supported markups they were going straight for the gold.

But then, one drop before beta1 eventually missed all the code for the adapters and the infamous System.Web.Mobile.dll had its comeback into scene. A few weeks after noticing it I innocently posted this. A week later I heard (just don’t ask where) that they were being cut off. A month later SusanC (blog?) confirmed it in the same thread. Then it got pretty much “official” with ShankuN announcement.

All this doesn’t lead to gold for sure. Why not silver then? Because I’m still not buying that the current adaptation architecture is here to last. Don’t take me wrong: it is way better than having no adaptation at all like the v1.x bits but it has it owns drawbacks too.

Bronze would be a better fit for now.