Progressive ICT

Introduction

There are a lot of examples on how to use a Web Service from managed world, but sometimes having the whole runtime installed is an unneeded luxury. If you want something light, this article will give you a taste of how this can be done.

For the past few years Web Service development has been one of my main areas of interest. I have been designing and developing all kinds of Web Services as well as client applications that consume Web Services. I have used different environments/languages to build web based clients as well as standalone desktop applications. One thing I didn't try before is to build a Web Service client application on a mobile device. This is one of the reasons why I have decided to build a mobile application for this article. I also wanted to have something a little bit more exciting than a stock ticker app or Amazon product search app that will use capabilities of the device it will be hosted on. Fortunately I have just received a new GPS enabled Smartphone MOTO Q 9h. Having a GPS on my phone was the second reason for a mobile application example, because I have a good web service to complete the picture, which is described below.

The demo application was tested on the MOTO Q 9h Smartphone. Screen size on that phone is 320x240. The demo application is not orientation and/or size aware. It uses s static 320x240 bitmap for background image. However it would not be hard to make it orientation/size aware.

Make sure you have read the article and have everything that is needed.
Download, unzip, compile, deploy and enjoy! I have also included a prebuilt CAB file.

I will be using ATL library which has built-in support for Web Services. For the UI I will be using one of my favorites - Windows Template Library. WTL is a lightweight extension to ATL. WTL provides template based wrappers for Windows controls and various Win32 APIs. WTL can be downloaded here. This article uses WTL 8.0 which integrates very well with Visual Studio 2005. After downloading and installing WTL, please run setup80.js from the AppWizMobile folder. That script will install Application Wizard for Visual Studio 2005.