MS Visual Studio Announcment From WES

The WES show in Orlando this week, is going to be a font of information and we can look forward to a raft of announcements and nifty gadget releases. As we detailed earlier, the blogosphere stole RIM’s thunder by leaking the Curve story early, but there is still plenty of new information coming out of the annual symposium.

Today is the first day of the symposium, and we’ll be there to cover everything in full. Our own Kevin Michaluk is jetting toward Orlando and will bring us up to date. Look for the CrackBerry.com logo.

This morning, RIM announced plans to introduce a new development tool that will enable developers to work within the familiar .NET programming environment. This will allow developers to create rich client wireless applications for the BlackBerry.

The BlackBerry Plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio gives system integrators and in-house corporate developers the ability to create BlackBerry applications that seamlessly integrate with back-end systems through .NET Web Services. According to the RIM release, corporations are coming to recognize the opportunities to boost productivity through wireless data applications and this application will go a long way to helping business realize those business opportunities.

BlackBerry MDS is a robust and widely deployed platform that enables wireless access to enterprise systems, and applications developed with the BlackBerry Plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio will benefit from its advanced security, manageability, network efficiency and push capabilities.

“RIM continues to provide a flexible and open development platform with robust tools, technical assistance and support of industry standards,” said Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO at Research In Motion. “This new developer tool meets the needs of the .NET developer community as well as enterprise customers by enabling the development of BlackBerry applications within the familiar framework of Visual Studio. It leverages existing skill sets as well as existing investments in the BlackBerry platform.”

The BlackBerry Plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio will be previewed at the Wireless Enterprise Symposium 2007 in Orlando, Florida this week and is expected to be available later this year as a free download at www.blackberrydeveloper.com.