[Richard Goodchild]

Hello,

We are a small company with several BlackBerry Pearl phones and would like to develop a very simple password calculator program to install on them for our service engineers. I have never developed any software for a BlackBerry before, although I am familiar with Visual Basic and some HTML language.

What I would like to know is:
1. What development software do I need to use to create an application for use on the phone and what is the basic procedure involved?
2. Is this software available as freeware anywhere?
3. If the above answer is "no", are there alternatives?

It is not worth us spending any money to do this, as we can get by creating a small bespoke VB application on the engineers' laptops, but it would be nice to install it on the BlackBerry Pearls instead.

Thanks,

Richard.

[jfisher]

everything you need is available from blackberry.com/developers/

[simon.hain]

to further answer your questions:
you don't have to pay anything unless you want access to secure APIs, for example the phone or the mail API.
you develop using java in a modified mobile edition.

your application would be extending uiapplication, pushing a mainscreen which maybe contains a buttonfield and a textfield. if you push the button the code shows up in the textfield.
you'll find all examples you may need coming with the JDE or in the developer guide pdf

hth,
simon

[brcewane]

If you have a BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) and you want to create a simple application, check out the BlackBerry Plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio. It may be what you are looking for since you have VB experience

It has limitations compared to writing in Java, but it is quick and simple.

[Richard Goodchild]

Thanks for the suggestions and apologies for the long radio silence: haven't had time to look at this for months.

The Visual Studio plug-in unfortunately does not work with our version of VB. Is there any conversion tool out there which could convert a standard VB exe file or VB project into the alx file required for the BlackBerry?

We have looked at the BlackBerry JDE, but none of us can work out where to begin with it - it seems to be a real black art!

Richard.

[brcewane]

There is no way to convert your VB exe file to a program that will run on the blackberry.. Your application will either need to be re-written as a Java application or an MDS Runtime application (this is done in the Visual Studio plugin)

[Richard Goodchild]

OK, thanks for the advice.

We'll read up on the JDE development guide!!!