BlackBerry Native

Plug-in for Visual Studio is Gold!

Check out the new Gold version of the plug-in

If you use Microsoft Visual Studio to develop apps for BlackBerry 10, we've got good news: the Gold version of the BlackBerry Native Plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio is now released! In this article, we take a look at some of the features in this release.

Highlights

There are a few features of the plug-in that are particularly important:

Support for the latest versions of Microsoft Visual Studio

The Gold release of the BlackBerry Native Plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio now supports Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2012 and 2013. You can continue to develop your C and C++ apps for BlackBerry 10 using the latest version of Microsoft Visual Studio. You can download the Gold version of the plug-in that matches the version of Visual Studio that you installed and read the documentation. You can also use the BlackBerry 10 Device Simulator to test your apps.

The latest version of the plug-in doesn't support Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. You can still download the previous version of the plug-in and documentation if you want to work in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

Open source

The BlackBerry Native Plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio is an open source plug-in that integrates with your Microsoft Visual Studio development environment. You can use the plug-in to develop C and C++ applications that target the BlackBerry 10 OS. If you want to work with the very latest version of the plug-in or contribute your own code, you can download the source code.

There are a few rules you need to remember:

You must be signed up as an official contributor.
All functions should be prefaced by a standard Microsoft Visual Studio comment block describing what the function does and including definitions of the parameters.
Code lines should be indented four spaces per editor tab.
Variable names should be in camel case format (for example, backColor).

Independent of the Momentics IDE

You don’t have to download the Momentics IDE for BlackBerry to get the tools and libraries to work in Microsoft Visual Studio. You just need to install either Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2012 or 2013 running under Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 and then download the plug-in.

Code signing with BlackBerry ID

You can use your BlackBerry ID to create a token to sign your apps and then distribute them to users. If you don't already have a BlackBerry ID, you can create one. You don’t have to worry about which computer you’re using to work on your app; you can access your debug token from anywhere.

4. Educate yourself

The Documentation tab contains tons of examples, tutorials, and best practices to guide you along the path towards building an awesome app.

The documentation for your preferred focus always appears at the top of the left-hand navigation, but you can still access the rest of the documentation at the bottom.

5. Start developing

The Reference tab is where you'll find essential details about how to use our APIs.

You can use the left-hand navigation to choose how you would like to browse the reference: by module, by topic, or alphabetically. If you have an idea of what you are looking for, start typing it in the Filter box.