Developing Ajax-enabled ASP.Net applications for the iPhone

Posted on 16th Feb 2014 by admin

I would like to develop Ajax web applications using Visual Studio that are optimized for the iPhone. There are a few resources on the web showing how this can be done. However, these tend to be optimized exclusively for the iPhone and also require some hacks to have MS Ajax work with certain OS versions of the iPhone. While the web app needs to be optimized for the iPhone, I don't want it to be exclusively designed for that device. The market is heating up with competition to the iPhone with devices that have higher screen resolution. My code should be able to detect what kind of device the user has and provide the properly optimized page. In the event that it cannot detect the device, at the very minimum, I would allow the user to indicate to the application what their screen resolution is. Once I know that, I should be able to provide the proper pages.As for Ajax, I am somewhat concerned about the size of Microsoft's Ajax library that gets downloaded to the client. I believe it's currently around 100k. That is still rather large for mobile devices having a slow Internet connection over a cell phone network. There are other non-Microsoft Ajax stacks available but I am not sure which ones would work with ASP.Net. I came across one that is about 10k. Does anyone know of another Ajax library out there that will work with ASP.Net pages? I don't necessarily require the UpdatePanel. As long as the library can perform a partial page update when working with the server, that is all that matters.Finally, I want the web application to mimic the way native iPhone apps work, with pages sliding in and out when they are navigated to. The UI of the web app should also look like a native app. This requires using the correct css formatting.What would be nice is to have either a project template or item template for Visual Studio that allows me to create an iPhone web app and includes support for an Ajax library that is small in footprint. Is anyone aware of such templates or third-party software that will allow me to quickly put together an Ajax-enabled web application designed for ASP.Net? Having spent several days reviewing what is currently available, it seems I need to end up spending a lot of time developing the infrastructure before I even get around to developing what my application really is suppose to do.