Launching the Emulator
Carbide has a couple default ways of launching a debug session with the emulator: one is to simply launch the emulator (epoc.exe), the other is to launch your executable directly. Doing the second will start the emulator and open your application, saving you the trouble of navigating to it and opening it yourself.
In Carbide 1.3 people asked us to change the default behavior so that it would launch your executable directly. Since then we’ve found that this only seems to work on some versions of the S60 emulator. Also if you plan to rebuild your app while the emulator is running this won’t work because the emulator will exit as soon as your app does.
In Carbide 1.3.1 we’ll be looking into better ways to adjust the default behavior and determine when it is OK to offer this launch option. Let us know if you would like to see Carbide offer any other options when launch an emulator debug session.
Good idea to make people choose how they want to launch the app, as both methods have their advantages.
The best option would of course be if it was possible to automatically launch the app in the emulator, but not to close the emulator when the app exits.
This would be especially helpful when there’s a panic, as it would be easier to get the error reason that way - logging to the console doesn’t always work for me with the S60 FP2-emulator for some reason.
It’d be even more helpful for beginners who don’t know where to look for the error and are wondering when the emulator just closes down.
If something like this wouldn’t be possible without a rewrite of the emulator, maybe a small autostart-app could help, which is placed in the emulator by Carbide.c++. It’s started with the emulator through its startup registry and immediately launches the app the user pressed play for in Carbide. That way, you’d have the advantage of an auto-starting app on (every) emulator, but without the disadvantage having to restart the emulator all the time.
Apart from this, it would also be great if you could integrate a check if the app-files are still in use before compiling. I frequently see that students do not close down the application in the emulator, recompile it and then wonder about some compiler messages. Would be a bit more user friendly if it was possible to warn users right away with a message like: “Warning - application is still active in the emulator. Compile anyway?”
Best regards,
Andreas