Extract from the SitePoint article “Visual Studio Community 2015: Going Mobile” by Brett Romero
This article was sponsored by Microsoft. Thank you for supporting the sponsors who make SitePoint possible.
Welcome back to our series of articles using Microsoft’s modern IDE: Visual Studio Community 2015 to quickly design and build an attractive, functional site for a client. If you missed the previous instalments, check them out below:
- Visual Studio Community 2015: Setting Up a Site
- Visual Studio Community 2015: Adding Email and Contact Pages
- Visual Studio Community 2015: Adding Ecommerce Functionality
In the final article of the series, we’re going to create a mobile app. The app will display a notification if there are new lessons available. Once the user sees the notification and dismisses it, they’ll see a cloud icon next to the new lesson, which helps the lesson stand out from the others.
We’ll use the popular Cordova framework to create our app. This will allow us to use web languages such as HTML and Javascript.
Behind the scenes, we’ll see how to create a multi page app using jQuery Mobile. jQuery Mobile will help us with styling and also making calls to a REST service. We’ll use the REST service to mock getting lessons from a remote source. This will let you see how to retreive remote data and parse it.
Creating a Cordova Project
To create a Cordova app in Visual Studio, select File > New > Project > Blank App (Apache Cordova).