After a very restorative vacation I have at last found time to play around with the new Blackberry Plugin for Visual Studio. My general impression after spending a couple of hours with this software is very positive.
Bit a problem was to get it installed. I have required to reboot my pc several times until the installation was successful. Very strange that a Microsoft SQL server is a required component for this plugin and though I already had it installed, it could not be found by the installer. I don't know what it has been doing, but I left it running during the lunch break. And it was there when I returned. What a nice surprise!
Nevertheless the plugin looks very good. It gives more control over the source code and program logic comparing with MDS Studio applications. It supports references to web services as one knows it from Visual Studio projects: add web reference --> pick up a web service --> client stubs are created by the ide and can be used. It is pretty straightforward. another thing to mention is that web services can also be called asynchronously. The programming language for own classes remains java script - just as in MDS Studio. A little irritating is that intellisence still shows visual studio reserved words like try, catch, class and so on that in fact are not valid language constructs in an MDS application. An error comes on compiling the project. There was also a strange behavior after creating a new project I could not compile it at all. I just said new Blackberry MDS Runtime application, made no changes to it and it would not start. The reason was an ampersand in the settings.mds file in the vendor field. But the error message delivered no reasonable hint to the problem: '"' is an unexpected token. The expected token is ';'. Line 2, position 119. Unfortunately no info or whatsoever about the file where the error occurred.
But these are minor issues. In general the plugin works good. Much more stable application deployment in the emulator than in MDS Studio, extended web services support and scripting, ability to create custom classes, new UI controls make the Blackberry Plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio a very powerful and comfortable application development tool for Blackberry.
Here is a product link:
http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/downloads/mvsplugin.jsp
Bit a problem was to get it installed. I have required to reboot my pc several times until the installation was successful. Very strange that a Microsoft SQL server is a required component for this plugin and though I already had it installed, it could not be found by the installer. I don't know what it has been doing, but I left it running during the lunch break. And it was there when I returned. What a nice surprise!
Nevertheless the plugin looks very good. It gives more control over the source code and program logic comparing with MDS Studio applications. It supports references to web services as one knows it from Visual Studio projects: add web reference --> pick up a web service --> client stubs are created by the ide and can be used. It is pretty straightforward. another thing to mention is that web services can also be called asynchronously. The programming language for own classes remains java script - just as in MDS Studio. A little irritating is that intellisence still shows visual studio reserved words like try, catch, class and so on that in fact are not valid language constructs in an MDS application. An error comes on compiling the project. There was also a strange behavior after creating a new project I could not compile it at all. I just said new Blackberry MDS Runtime application, made no changes to it and it would not start. The reason was an ampersand in the settings.mds file in the vendor field. But the error message delivered no reasonable hint to the problem: '"' is an unexpected token. The expected token is ';'. Line 2, position 119. Unfortunately no info or whatsoever about the file where the error occurred.
But these are minor issues. In general the plugin works good. Much more stable application deployment in the emulator than in MDS Studio, extended web services support and scripting, ability to create custom classes, new UI controls make the Blackberry Plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio a very powerful and comfortable application development tool for Blackberry.
Here is a product link:
http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/downloads/mvsplugin.jsp
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