Mike Kirkup over at the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog has posted an end of year wrap up for 2009 of accomplishments from within the BlackBerry developer community. RIM has come a long way this year alone, opening many doors for further development/improvement of the BlackBerry platform. The developers are the ones that make things happen and we all should appreciate their efforts, I can’t wait to see what they have in store for 2010! Here are the highlights:

• Launch of the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog and technical webcast series!Over 200,000 Registered BlackBerry developers.
• Doubled the size of the developer community over the past year with substantial international growth.
• Launch of BlackBerry App World™ with follow up releases including a new client and a web store.
• Launch of the Developer Issue Tracker providing an open environment for developers to submit issues and feature requests tracked against Research In Motion’s internal development queue.  An industry first!
• Best BlackBerry developer event ever with the 2009 BlackBerry® Developer Conference.
• BlackBerry Partners Fund Developer Challenge ends in a dramatic Final 16 showdown live at the BlackBerry Developer Conference and awards more than US $250,000 in prizes.
• Revamp of the BlackBerry® Developer Zone making it easier to find what you are looking for, download tools and get started developing.
• Launch of many new BlackBerry developer programs and resources including:
  1. Video tutorial library with videos now on YouTube®!  Go to www.youtube.com/blackberry and select one of the developer playlists.
  2. BlackBerry Academic Program for mobile application development. Visit www.blackberry.com/developers/academic for more info.
  3. BlackBerry Certification Program for application developers. Visit www.blackberry.com/certification for more info.
• Launch of numerous developer tools and technologies including:
  1. BlackBerry® Java® Plug-in for Eclipse® v1.1, Beta 2 for Java developers.
  2. BlackBerry® Widget SDK v1.0 Beta 2 for web developers.
  3. Web development tools BlackBerry® Plug-in for Microsoft® Visual Studio® v1.2 and BlackBerry® Web Development Plug-in for Eclipse® v1.0.
  4. BlackBerry® Theme Studio v5.0 for BlackBerry theme developers.

via BB Dev Blog