S60 Open to new features

Have you ever wondered exactly how to use the CodeScanner tool? Well if so, you're in luck! This week's screencast installment features this topic:

You can find this and other videos at: http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Carbide_Training_Videos

Got ideas for screencasts you'd like to see? Leave us some feedback here and we'll get on it!

We have yet another screencast to bring to you. This one is a quick overview of some helpful shortcuts for working within Carbide.c++. Hopefully a few of these tips will make Carbide.c++ even easier to use:

You can find this and other videos at: http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Carbide_Training_Videos

Got ideas for screencasts you'd like to see? Leave us some feedback here and we'll get on it!

A new screencast has been posted -- it walks you through debugging a simple project with DLLs and talks a bit about the Executables view. Shouldn't be anything special to many of you, but maybe a few could use the review...

I've just spent the last week revising the entire launch configuration section of the Carbide manual to make it easier to understand, remove redundancies, and show its advantages when writing and debugging projects. The whole concept of a launch configuration was a bit strange to me when we first began developing Carbide but its gradually become a critical component to understanding how to link the code you write with one or more ways of running or debugging it to ensure its correctness. Therefore it seemed an obvious choice for a good edit and update. So that's what I've done.

We do a really cool thing with our launch configuration for the emulator that some developers seem to overllook when they want to debug their application. it wasn't very obvious to users in Carbide 1.3 but it can save users development time. When the user wants to debug their application with Carbide the Symbian OS Emulator launch configuration does not launch the emulator by default but instead launches the executable built by the project.

The main reason we did this was because many users complained about how slow the emulator was to start before they could even launch their application! Also, there can be other problems when keeping the emulator running while creating an application. For example, the emulator locks resource files for some time after exiting out of the application. So if the user changed a resource file he would have to wait for the emulator to release all resources before the user could rebuild his.

This has worked very well for any kits based on Symbian OS developement kit version 9.2 or above.

For this quick tip I thought it might be helpful to point out where customers can set their own build options in Carbide that take place after our build process. This can be useful for things like running a batch file after the build, but customers haven't always known where to find the option for this. In Carbide.c++ v1.3, with the project highlighted choose the "Project" and "Properties" option from the menu bar.

If you are building scalable (SVG) icons for your S60 application, chances are you are using makefiles without dependency tracking. I've noticed quite a few large projects that contain several icon makefiles without proper dependency tracking which can vastly degrage rebuild performance. For example, taking 15 minutes to rebuild instead of 10 seconds for a dependency check. This is typically due to header files that are always generated under \epoc32\include (e.g. MBG files) and causing subsequent CPP files to be unnecessarily re-compiled and the project re-linked.

A basic overview of the Carbide C/C++ and Debugger perspectives has been posted:

You can find this and other videos at:
http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Carbide_Training_Videos

This is pretty basic stuff; we're trying to put down a solid foundation of the fundamentals first, and then we'll start working on the more exotic stuff. We're always looking for screencast ideas, though, so speak up if you have any ideas.