So I'm about to embark on a new mobile project tomorrow.  Wow, fresh start new Visual Studio Solution,  don't you just love it...

The solution I am putting in place is a mobile field service application for a client.    We're currently looking at hardware but I suspect it will be something from the Symbol range.   

So the interesting thing about this project is that it requires an absolute network connection back to a base ERP system.    The reason this is is so critical is that as the mobile user enters values business decisions need to be made in almost realtime to allocate product into lots and organise onwards manufacturer and distribution down the supply chain.   Additionally their is interplay between mobile users, so updates from one mobile device needs to cause menus and things to change on all of the other devices in this solution.

So for this architecture to work, we're looking at either -

1. Compact Framework app calling into secured web-service.
2. Browser Based (Mobile AJAX - of course).

The other interesting element of this, is that mobile printing is required (printing of barcode labels).

This would appear to rule out option 2 (the browser solution).     However given that this is a large scale deployment than this may be the best route.     The mobile printing 'could' be triggered from a native code Active X - although I'm personally a little scared by this.

The other key aspect is that this solution needs to work over the public phone network, with bluetooth attached printers.   Back to option 1, winning again, as we can minimise network traffic (and cost) by using something running on the device.

Its amazing that mobile technology still provokes such interesting technical challenges.   Although the work this week on Mobile AJAX is fun,    there are still many an instance where writing code that runs on the device is the way to go...