.NET Mobile Apps while Soft/Hard Reset

Question here is where to find best practices for designing my program and have in mind if user makes a soft or hard reset on the mobile device?! What happens to my program? How i can开发者_StackOverflow社区 deal with that? Install in storage card? Having the setup file somewhere and after reset setup again automatically?

Any info and help appreciated! Thank you.

For a soft reset, that's easy. A shortcut in in the Startup folder will get you running again. Hard reset is more difficult becasue by the very definition, it returns a device to factory state. The user would be required to do a reinstall. Now that can be facilitated using storage cards, a custom autorun.exe or device specific features (like what Symbol has), but it's going to be really, really hard to have a solution that works across all devices. In those cases, it's best to let the user know that after a hard reset, the application must be reinstalled in the same way it was installed in the first place.

Reseting the device while the application runs is kind of out of the normal usage. The only thing that you can do is detect it, and, if your app deals with documents, recover the last autosaved version. Do autosave as much as you are capable of, without degrading user experience.

As for the detection, you can place a temporary file into the application's directory on startup, and remove it during normal the shutdown of it. This will also help when your application crashes for some reason.

All in all, you can't provide a perfect solution for this. If you use MS Office, you can see a similar approach I described here. I know we can't except high enough level of idiocy from the users, but I think most of them will understand that resetting the device won't do any good for the running apps.

Edit: I misunderstood the OP's question. I keep the above parts for reference. Well, if you need to reinstall the app, you can't do anything. You didn't tell us much about you application, but you may store some data on a remote server and have your users login when they install the app.