This set of tutorials assumes that you've already reviewed the Getting Started area of this site and are now ready to begin setting up your development environment.

Your development environment refers to (1) the development workstation on which you will be doing your development work - the actual coding, compiling, and debugging - and (2) the development server. Your development server will host an instance of Blackboard Learn, Developer Edition - a version of the Blackboard learning platform that we make available for development purposes that has the Content System, Community System, and Learning System all enabled to support up to 150 test users, 100 test courses, and 1000 test enrollment records. In many cases, developers choose to run Blackboard Learn, Developer Edition on their development workstation rather than on separate server hardware (see hardware recommendations). Others choose to share a dedicated development server among multiple developers, each connecting to it from their individual development workstations. Still others have created their own virtual machine images that allow unwanted changes to be "thrown away" and easily restore to a vanilla installation of their development server.

This set of tutorials will provide instruction around setting up your development workstation, development server, and how to enable debugging of your code so that you can step through it line-by-line when trying to isolate issues or bugs. It also covers more generally the overall life cycle of the typical Blackboard Building Block development project.