This exercise will take you through creating a mobile-enabled SharePoint feature from scratch.  It is almost identical to creating any SharePoint feature in Visual Studio 2008.  In addition to VS 2008 and SharePoint, you will need a couple of things installed before you get started:

1.       Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, v1.3

2.       Mobile Entrée Enterprise (or 30-day trial)

If you have downloaded the Mobile Entrée SDK, you will notice that it also comes with some Visual Studio templates.  For the sake of this exercise, we will be creating our app from scratch, but you can certainly use these templates as well.

Creating the Project
The first step in creating our mobile SharePoint feature will be to create the Visual Studio project:

1.       Open Visual Studio 2008

2.       Select File > New > Project

3.       Under the language of your choice, select SharePoint.

4.       Create a project based on the Empty template

Adding the Mobile Entrée Reference
With the project created, you will want to add the reference to the Mobile Entrée Library:

1.       In your Solution Explorer, right-click the References folder and select Add Reference.

2.       Under the .NET tab, select the EntreeServer.Module component.

Adding the SharePoint Feature
The feature type we want to add for mobile-enabled applications is the Module.  This allows your feature to contain resources that will get deployed to the SharePoint site for use within your mobile application.

1.       In your Solution Explorer, right-click the project node and select Add > New Item

2.       Under your .NET language select SharePoint

3.       Select the Module template

Once added you can remove the sample.txt from the module folder and remove it’s reference from the Module.xml.

Adding the Mobile Application Class
Here is where we start differing from a basic SharePoint feature.  All mobile applications built upon the Mobile Entrée framework are .NET classes that implement the EntreeApplication class.  You can draw parallels between development of a webpart and a Mobile Entrée application.

1.       In your solution explorer, right-click the project node and select Add > Class…

2.       Once added ensure that your class is public and implement the EntreeServer.Module.EntreeApplication class.

There are a number of properties and a method that get implemented with this class.  All of them require a value and you can read what each of them mean here.

Note: As of 1.1, the IconUrl Property will be optional and a default icon will be used if one is not defined.

Deploying your Mobile Feature
Now that you have a mobile application defined in your feature it’s time to take the last step to allow it to be recognized by the Mobile Entrée framework.  Your solution’s feature.xml file requires a property specifying the assembly reference to your feature.

1.       In your solution explorer, right-click the project node and select Deploy.

2.       Find the assembly information for your DLL, if you deployed to the GAC you can easily find this information inside your Windows/assembly folder.

3.       Under your projects pkg/module folder, open the feature.xml file that was created by Visual Studio.

4.       Add a <Properties> node containing the assembly info for your solution.

5.       Deploy your solution again.

You have now created a mobile-enabled SharePoint Feature that is recognized by the Mobile Entrée framework.  Ensure that your site has the Mobile Entree Base Feature enabled and you should see your application listed in the Mobile Entrée Configuration.

Note: In order for this mobile application to function properly, you must add functionality via the QueryList method.

Note: Your application must be strongly named to be loaded by the framework.