Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Misc : Blackberry vs Compact Framework development

You can say what you like about Microsoft but the Compact Framework development environment and support creams RIM and Blackberry hands down, TKO, no contest!

  1. Visual Studio is a much better, less buggy IDE than the Blackberry JDE.
  2. Deployment is much easier with Active Synch as opposed to Desktop Manager. It's basically another folder and you can drag and drop all kinds of files anywhere.
  3. Blackberry Forum support is a joke. Does anyone from RIM actually read it? Most of the posts go unanswered for days on end. Compare this to the Google group "microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.compactframework". You get answers within hours and the quality is excellent with such people as Peter Foot, Paul G Tobey, Daniel The Moth, the two Alex's and so on.
  4. CF has the superb OpenNETCF. RIM has nothing even remotely comparable.
  5. Do a Google search for some CF samples. You are spoiled for choice. Do the same for Blackberry - the quickest way I know to return zero Google results. If anyone out there is doing Blackberry development, they certainly don't seem to be posting it to anywhere.
  6. To be fair, Blackberry is constrained by the J2ME environment in terms of the quantity and richness of the components but it's still no contest.

Enjoy!

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