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Porting the magnifier to Windows CE
felipemdc:
Hello,
I am porting the Virtual Magnifying Glass ( http://magnifier.sourceforge.net/ ) to Windows CE - LCL, and I thought posting what I learn doing it here might help others porting LCL software to WinCE-LCL.
To start with, the free pascal version that really worked for me was the snapshot from CCRDude. It can be downloaded here:
http://www.see-cure.de/files/lazarus-arm-wince-20060707.7z
I am using it together with the Emulator from Microsoft before I acctually try on a real device.
The first thing to do was rework all my conditional defines, and change them from IFDEF Win32 to the more platform-independent IFDEF Windows
Some code remained with IFDEF Win32 because either I don´t need it on Pocket PC, or because it uses ShellAPI, which is not available on WinCE.
I created my own batch files to do tasks like, compile the software and copy it to the emulator shared folder. Or call GDB via active sync.
A big problem at the moment is that $R resource directive doesn´t work on Windows CE, so I think I will need to put my pictures on the same directory as my executable on WinCE.
I alse needed to search on MSDN for all Windows API functions I use directly to make sure my app will run on many Windows CE version. A good way to search msdn for WinCE api is by googling this:
site:msdn.microsoft.com "Windows CE" <FunctionName>
So far everything is great. Keyboard events work completely across all target platforms with LCL, I can create TBitmap images and manipulate them, detect the Windows CE version, detect the Screen Size.
In about 3 hours I made an application completely unprepared for windows ce to run. It´s not fully working, but the port is going well.
Later I will post more info.
CCRDude:
Hmmm there's a define "Windows"? That's good to know :)
But: $R works! The background, the icon and the image on my mini demo are all loaded from the resource file, as is the menu of some of the other apps I'm writing:
(http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/483/miniguidemoju8.th.png)
What exactly was your problem with $R?
For help on the API functions, I've downloaded the Pocket PC 2003 SDK (as well as the Smartphone 2003 SDK, which is needed to have cabwizsp.exe, since the cabwiz.exe from the Pocket PC SDK only creates cab installers for Pocket PCs). Searching in the CHM file on the local machine is a bit faster than doing online lookups on MSDN ;)
(btw: just spent a few hours tracking a very silly thing: when using the API directly (not sure about the LCL), which uses wide strings, there needs to be special care about TStringList - the compiler creates code that creates EBusErrors when assigning a WideString from a control to a TStringList.Text, even when typecasting with AnsiString - but not the other way round, which works).
felipemdc:
> What exactly was your problem with $R?
I was getting this error: magnifier.dpr(92) Error: resource compiler not found, switching to external mode
I am using my own arm-binutils instead of the ones your package provides, and arm-wince-windres wasn´t together with the binutils.
Just copying it to the folder where my binutils are and it worked!
thanks
felipemdc:
--- Quote ---Hmmm there's a define "Windows"? That's good to know :)
--- End quote ---
Yes, but be careful that Windows define isn´t defined on FPC 2.0.2 which you normally use to compile Win32 applications. It´s now defined on FPC 2.0.4 for Win32.
To solve this, and keep compatibility with FPC 2.0.2 I add this statement to my main program file:
{$IFDEF Win32}
{$DEFINE Windows}
{$ENDIF}
CCRDude:
Oh, then I'll stick to my own defines for now, since they already work ;)
Btw: I tried to reproduce a situation where resource files didn't work for me as well (since I remembered I had problems with them at first as well). WinCE doesn't seem to like menu items that are disabled, as soon as I disable one in the resource file, it breaks the app.
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