Device Specificity

Team Fly

Page 658

FIGURE 22.9 Some users would panic if this appeared on their cell phone.

FIGURE 22.10 Rather than the default messages, intercept errors and show users something they can understand.

Press F5 and VB.NET will choke on the MsgBox, causing an error and displaying your custom message page rather than the default page.

Device Specificity

Although word wrapping, color rendering and other features of display devices are generally automatically handled for you on most mobile devices, you must sometimes perform the old is it Internet Explorer or is it Netscape? branching within your code. Of course Netscape is all but dead now, but varying kinds of mobile operating systems—and varying display capabilities, input keys, and hardware features—are still alive and well. The differences between Palm and Pocket PC systems aren't trivial, not to mention the variations of output you can expect between phones and PDAs.

Team Fly