After getting in 45 minutes late I made my way down to the Santa Clara Marriott from San Francisco International Airport. Going south on the 101 I passed such notables as Postini, SalesGenie, Yahoo! and of course, the now famous Mountain View. There was indeed "no evil" going on that I could see from the freeway.
 
I got to catch the last 25 minutes of RIM Team Lead for Java Development Platform, Ken Wallis. He went over MDS Runtime basics (very much like his excellent session at WES 08). He also pimped my session on Wednesday too! Thanks Ken. Oh, and he also dropped that MDS Studio 2.0 is now out of beta! Get it from http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/rapidappdev/mdsstudio.jsp. I haven't tried it yet myself.

Other notable news was delivered by Tim Neil and (again) Ken Wallis. RIM are at last developing tools to allow for web development, or more importantly debugging, right from Eclipse and/or Visual Studio. This seems to be using a lot of the work that went into MDS Studio 2.0 and MDS Plug in for Visual Studio 1.1. They repeatedly pointed out that this was very. very early in the development cycle and is not yet on any roadmaps. It is good to see RIM standardizing their appdev tool sets.

Additionally "Argon" (the code name for BES 5.0) was demoed from an appdev point of view. The main takeaway I had was the new web interface (Argon is web based, gone is BlackBerry Manager) is much , much cleaner than the one shown at WES back in May. Also a nugget was dropped that you can use "Argon" to manage any BES with version 4.1.3 or higher.

And for all those out there who now believe to code MDS Runtime applications need to know Java. You do not! It uses JavaScript. This was mentioned several times in a community session. Someone really should edit these for content. Consider this as me volunteering to do this next year.

Oh, and at least one part of RIM use Domino, web services and MDS Studio to develop an internal "case tracker" tool.

Finally Verizon had the busiest booth showing the new Storm. No surprises there.