Building  mobile LOB economically is all about re-use.    This might (and I'm sure it does) sound glaringly obvious...    

The first thing to achieve was packaging all of the stuff we use repeatedly into a separate class library.   Its not on the scale of OpenNetCF, but its a set of common stuff that are appropriate to our type of LOB applications.  This applications usually consume data from an ERP system (Dynamics

NAV, SAP, JDE Edwards, MS Access ).   It contains useful methods and forms like a standard SQL Compact synchronization dialog, that kind of thing...

So our built up knowledge all goes into our template class library.     The application we're building references this library.

The final part of any solution is to build a setup cab project, to enable easy peezy deployment.

So in Visual Studio we see a solution that looks like this -

This approach saves a massive amount of time and it means we can concentrate on the build process referencing any ' good stuff' we have built along the way.

Needless to say once about 10 applications were built this way the template class library has built up to contain most of the functionality we are ever asked for.

It hasn't quite left us me the easy life I thought it would; but it sure takes the ' washing up' out of having to do the monotonous stuff each time.