Research in Motion (RIM) offers two ways of writing applications for BlackBerry devices–Native Java, and the Microsoft Visual Studio plugin.  As a VB.Net developer, I was tempted to go the Visual Studio plugin approach, but I decided against it for the following reasons:

  • It’s geared more towards rapid forms-based applications that communicate by web services.
  • It requires the user to be on a BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
  • It does not provide access to all of the APIs and BlackBerry features that you get with Java; for example, camera, phone, Bluetooth, address book, GPS, BlackBerry Maps, and BlackBerry Message features.
  • It doesn’t support the BlackBerry Storm touch screen and accelerometer.
  • Debugging and deployment is more difficult, and the Visual Studio plugin only comes with a BlackBerry Bold simulator.  The Java tools come with a BlackBerry Storm simulator.

For these reasons, to be able to debug for the Storm, and to have access to the entire BlackBerry library, I decided to go with the Java approach.  The transition is quite easy, once you get the development environment in place and write your first test application.  The BlackBerry website has a lot of good information for developers, if you’re able to find it.

I found that this page has everything you need to get started developing BlackBerry applications:

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/resources/tutorials.jsp#tab_tab_development

Rather than copy and paste information from their guides, I’ll just point out some of the things I wish were clearer in each document.


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