There are several Symbian project wizards that allow for quick-starting the development, but they never satisfied me enough. I wanted something simple, yet modifiable and extensible. Existing wizards just didn’t suite the SymbianExample needs. I had to create an own tool and I am glad to share it with everyone.
The HelloWorld united is an example application with which you can start getting hands on the S60 3rd edition development. It works on emulator out of the box, compiles both for 2nd and 3rd editions, but there are no instructions on how you can install this application to the real 3rd edition device.
Kuneri Bloggy wrote a nice tutorial on packaging the Hello World united. It includes all the details from getting the developer certificate from Symbian to running the application on hardware. Check it out.
ExeDlls are the targets for Symbian projects that make the projects compile into EXE for the hardware platform and into a special DLL, that can be launched as an EXE from the WINS emulator.
For S60 3rd edition EXEs can be started from the fully loaded emulator and some system interfaces have been changed. Universal HelloExeDll uses a bit of preprocessor magic and can be compiled both for S60 3rd and 2nd edition. On the 3rd edition the project will be built as an EXE; on the 2nd edition it will be built as a usual ExeDll - as an EXE for hardware and as a DLL for WINS.
The 3rd edition of Nokia's S60 platform is all cool and new, but there are a lot of older devices you would still like to support.
The introduction of platform security in the 3rd edition changed the internals of the system a lot. However, from the point of view of the regular application programmer, changes are not that big and are mostly related to the configuration-like issues. We have to rewrite the MMP file, declare couple of things differently, use different type of icons, etc. - a lot of small things that you just have to carefully do once. As the end result of these small differences you'll have two projects with a bit different structure, a bit different set of files and minor changes in the application code.
Usual exe servers run on WINS can't have access to the system servers such as ECom, DBMS, Window server, etc. EXEDLL projects help to cope with this problem.
Generally, exe programs are used to implement servers or simple console programs. When you start an exe program on WINS, emulator launches in a very limited mode with the text console and almost no system services enabled. It might be sufficient for test programs, but makes it rather difficult to develop sophisticated exe servers.
To overcome the problem you can use the EXEDLL project target. It compiles into EXE for hardware environments and into DLL for WINS. It means that you can launch them from the fully loaded emulator. You can use the ExeLauncher for it.
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