When aircraft carriers pull into port for maintenance and repair in the near future, Newport News Shipbuilding, the United States Navy and a host of partners and subcontractors will be ready to go to work. Projects of this scale and complexity are familiar to Newport News Shipbuilding, which designs, builds and maintains some of the most sophisticated ships in the world. But now the company is adding something new to its tool kit: a mobile application for project managers developed by its information systems subsidiary, Naptheon Inc. It is based on the latest extension of Microsoft's .NET initiative and loaded onto Pocket PCs. The solution -- among the first end-to-end .NET applications to integrate server, desktop and mobile device components -- is being demonstrated in prototype form this week at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in support of Microsoft's technology preview of the .NET Compact Framework and Smart Device Extensions for Visual Studio .NET. The combination will enable a new class of enterprise applications to smart devices such as PDAs, and redefine the standard by which mobile development platforms are judged.