How to share data between a Mobile App (.Net Compact) and a Winforms one (.Net)?

I have a rich desktop application (.net 2.0) and I'm designing an app to run in Windows Mobile/Phone devices (using .Net Compact Fwk). The idea is that the mobile app is basically a data entering app with no lots of features in it.

My question is how would be the best approach to "send" the mobile captured data to my main app. I can think of exporting an XML file with the data, connecting directly to开发者_开发百科 a Webservice, etc... but it really should be easy for end users as they are not technical ones.

May be sending an email... connecting through bluetooth...

Lets see pros and cons...

Thanks in advance!

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It greatly depends on your topology. How are the device and PC related physically? How do you want the transfer initiated (from the PC or device)?

If they connect to the PC via USB, then RAPI might be a reasonable approach assuming PC initiation is acceptable.

If they are on the same network, then a WCF web service on the PC is probably the approach I'd take. It would require device initiation.

If the device is remote fromthe PC and the PC is non-reachable (so a web service won't work) then a transport like email might work, but it's going to get ugly having to watch for and parse those. I'd be more inclined to put a public service up or use something like Azure that both the device and PC talk to that acts as a data gateway.

Of course if all of your data is stored in a database, then Merge Replication may well be an option as well.

Bluetooth is probably a bad idea, as you're going to have to write the protocol on both ends and rely on users to actually do pairing, etc. That sounds like a support nightmare to me.