I am currently using netbeans 6.7 to develop some j2me apps for a phone. However, I am not very fond of the netbeans IDE and its clunky debugger and would rather use Visual Studio for development.
Does anyone here have a tutorial on how to use Visual Studio 2008 to compile and debug J2ME apps? I would like to tie VS2008 up to an emulator so that I can run the code in the phone emulator and debug it like I would in netbeans.
Maybe you should try using Eclipse Instead.
I don't see how you can tie VS 2008 into the javac to get the stuff to compile. How you're going to get syntax highlighting to work - or how you're going to get all of your javadoc stuff linked in properly.
Netbeans 6.7 is the latest Rev but look at other IDEs....
I personally swear by Intellij Idea -- the best damn ide for java devt there is out there. And it has excellent j2me integration too. One may be put off by the fact that it's not free, but a) $200 is nothing compared to a VS license (or IBM WSDS if you're unlucky) and b) this is the most polished java ide I've seen. Well worth the money, and it comes with a warm fuzzy feeling.
One other thing to remember is whether you will develop for one J2ME phone or a lot of them. Because if you do develop for a lot of J2ME phones then the manufacturer's Java SDK's may be required, for various things, for example controlling the backlight timer through an API (Nokia has this API).
Now, in this scenario you will find instructions for installing and using this SDK for Eclipse and Netbeans on the net or with the SDK docs. For Visual Studio 2008 you are on your own, making it a much harder issue to resolve, for something that can be avoided.
As someone who prefers to hand-code everything, I use a little known IDE called 'Ready To Program' for all my J2ME developments. In fact, it's simple to use - just download Sun's J2ME Wireless Toolkit v. 2.5 and install it like any other software. That's all there is to it.
You'll find more on how to use the Sun J2ME Wireless Toolkit v. 2.5 here. The Doc folder in has a nice info on how to get hacking very quickly.
That's how I write my J2ME apps - simple and straight forward :)
I guess you can connect Visual Studio with java but it is pointless since Netbeans has fully integrated java ME (see the link http://www.netbeans.org/features/javame/ ) together with emulator and pretty much every thing you will need ...
I am also looking for the same thing, coding J2ME on VS2005/VS2008...
while looking around I found this: http://www.improve.dk/blog/2007/09/29/compiling-java-in-visual-studio
it compiles java using javac and java as external tool, but i think that should give us the start of development.
am looking for that part where we develop J2ME apps using console (pure hard-code) and hopefully we can bring that to VS200*. Will update answers here... :)