How to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to a .NET application

Many recent researches http://www.spiceworks.com/voit/state-of-smb-2012-05.pdf show that application developers are forced to accept the fact that BYOD support requirement for their applications is already here. The pressure to support any device the user will bring and connect to the applications (BYOD) will only increase in the coming weeks and months.

For the .NET developer, this means that desktop applications currently targeting one, or a few, desktop platforms, will need a dramatic change to be able to support all the device types and OS’s the user might want to use.

There are typically two possible paths developers can take to support more types of devices. They can either build a new version of the application, targeting the specific platform that needs to be supported, or they can decide to go for a web based application. Either way, the learning curve is quite steep for the .NET developer and the conversion process is not all that simple.

There is another way out of all this mess though, which is well worth exploring. Gizmox has the Transposition studio to assist you in converting your application to a .NET based web application, which makes the conversion process as easy as it can ever get. But I will discuss this path in details in another post.

So you might ask what you gain by converting your existing .NET application into another .NET application, and that is a fair question. Well, when moving to Visual WebGui or developing from scratch with its visual .NET form designer you get a web enabled .NET application. This means you will use your existing .NET development skills to producing web applications. The Visual WebGui framework then takes care of the rest and renders your forms as HTML5 web forms for your browser. Any HTML5 enabled browser can then use your application.

So how does mobile comes into play, you ask. With the recently added Enterprise Mobile support, the application that renders as HTML5 on the client can be accessed by any device with a WebKit supported browser. The same application code can serve desktop browser and many types of tablet or mobile devices. When a request hits the webserver, the webserver determines the capabilities and type of the device, and serves the appropriate type of markup as the response to that request. As we all know, forms designed for small mobile devices are not well fit for large screen desktop devices and vice versa. Visual WebGui can take care of that too, by routing the mobile request and the desktop request to different representations, each fitting the requesting device.

Here is a short entertaining clip about the Enterprise Mobile solution