Blackberry Development - Any suggestions on references and tools?

Question

I\'m looking for good reference materials and open to recommendations about good IDE tools that I can use to develop for the Blackberry. I\'ve been to RIM\'s site and exper

Answer 1

I use a bit of an odd configuration: IntelliJ Idea for developing code (only because I've used it for years and I'm familiar with it and I use it for other parts of the system) and the BlackBerry JDE for running the simulators, debugging, attaching to devices, etc. For compiling and signing for deployment or uploading to devices, I use ant tasks. I know - strange - but it works. I may try the Eclipse plugin one of these days as I saw it demoed at WES 2009 and it looks quite nice.

As for the comments about Vista problems - I use the above dev tools fine on Vista 64 bit. There are just a few gotchas to get around:

1. Don't install the JDE or simulators in the default C:\Program Files folder, as they need to write to their own directory during runtime and Vista does not like the user accounts writing to any subdirectory under C:\Program Files. I install my JDE and simulators in C:\rim
2. If you're using a 64 bit OS, make sure you install the 32-bit Java SDK to run and compile with. The simulators and possibly the JDE have native 32-bit code in them that will not run with a 64-bit Java SDK.