I'm a long term Delphi user but completely new to Lazarus/fpc. I'm looking at Lazarus as a means of programming a Windows Mobile Pocket PC in a language I already know.

I found some information on installing a WinCE development system, and I understand I need the basic Windows Lazarus install plus an add-on install for WinCE. It was stated I had to have exactly the same fpc version for each of them.

I have found and installed lazarus-0.9.26-fpc-2.2.2-win32.exe, but the only file I can locate for what I think is the WinCE add-on is lazarus-0.9.23-fpc-2.2.1-20070916-cross-arm-wince-win32.exe

Can anybody advise me what I should install please?

Many thanks in advance,

Andy

2008/11/1 Andy Lawrie :

have a look at the snapshot page:

http://www.hu.freepascal.org/lazarus/

henry

From
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=89339&package_id=105599&release_id=631057 download
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/lazarus/Lazarus-0.9.26-fpc-2.2.2-cross-arm-wince-win32.exe?use_mirror=

Vincent

Many thanks for that Vincent, also to Henry.

I downloaded it and started to install it, but it wasn't clear what I should have installed, and in what order. I found it a bit confusing because the new file said it was going to install Lazarus, so I thought I should stop and uninstall the existing Lazarus installation first. Then, then when I completed the install of the new file, Lazarus wasn't present, so I uninstalled it again, reinstalled the original and then installed this one again.

After which I created a simple application, using LCL widget type" wince (beta)", Target OS "WinCE" and target cpu family "arm". I'm pleased to say this compiled OK.

I've now stalled on getting the emulator running - the links to MS in the documentation don't work. It may be overkill, but as I have an MSDN sub I installed VS2008 Pro, which includes the emulator. But I still haven't worked out how to start the emulator running the new app, but outside of VS2008.

Rgds, Andy

Hello,

Just follow carefully the step-by-step the instructions in the wiki:

http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Windows_CE_Interface#Using_the_stable_add-on_installer

Since 0.9.26 we have a stable wince release with good quality, so I recommend that you use the stable add on installer.

And here are the instructions to install the emulator:

http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Windows_CE_Interface#Installing_and_Using_the_Pocket_PC_Emulator

What link didn't work from those instructions?

Hi Felipe,

It was the links to MS that didn't work for me, so I couldn't download the emulator. That was when I tried installing VS2008, which has a later version of the emulator (v3), but having installed it I couldn't work out how to use that version from outside VS2008.

But now the links from the web page work, I've downloaded and installed the emulator, and it all works fine, thanks. It looks like I was unlucky first time, maybe the MS site was unavailable for a few minutes just when I tried it.

Out of interest, athough I installed the v1 emulator AFTER installing VS2008, when I click on the emulator image menu, the emulator that runs is v3 that was installd by VS2008.

I'll go away and have a little play with it now, but first impressions are that it is very good indeed.

Thanks for your assistance.

Rgds, Andy

Andy Lawrie wrote

I'll go away and have a little play with it now, but first impressions are that it is very good indeed.

From a long-time Delphi user like you that's praise indeed :-)

It would be nice if we could persuade Dave Jewell to take another look- I think last time he tried it on a Mac and got bogged down with an external debugger.

I haven't even tried to get remote debugging working on the emulator or the device yet. As an elderly embedded systems programmer I tend to rely more on debug output and observation of symptoms.

Debuggers don't work so well on the sort of problems you tend to get on real time systems. But even when debugging an ordinary non-real time program in Delphi it is quite rare for me to use the debugger. However, in certain situations they are invaluable so I will be trying to get the remote debugger working at some point, just not yet :-)

All I've doen so far is play around with standard components and straightforward code. Today I'll probably try to work out less standard features like controlling the SIP, controlling power, talking to the serial port, access the registry and so on, for some of which I may have to hit the API directly.

Rgds, Andy

Still mostly looking very good,the more I'm using it the more I like it.

I've come up with a range of issues, from "important" to "would be nice" to "just a discussion point", e.g.

Static text AV's on form load if caption is 0 chars long. Static text doesn't show border.
"Copy" doesn't work in property editor.
Windows don't always come to the front when clicked. A half column wide space to the left of column 1 in editor would reduce the number of times I accidentally set a breakpoint when using the mouse to select from the start of a line.
Generates a hint "Local variable x does not seem to be initialised" when use a local as a var parameter.

How far down the list should these go in the bug tracker?

Rgds, Andy

Andy Lawrie wrote

Static text AV's on form load if caption is 0 chars long. Static text doesn't show border. "Copy" doesn't work in property editor. Windows don't always come to the front when clicked.

Can not reproduce any of these with trunk version in Windows XP. Seems that these issues are either already fixed of WinCE-specific.

A half column wide space to the left of column 1 in editor would reduce the number of times I accidentally set a breakpoint when using the mouse to select from the start of a line.

I would prefer a configuration option to show/hide 'breakpoints column' of the gutter.

Generates a hint "Local variable x does not seem to be initialised" when use a local as a var parameter.

If the variable is indeed not initialized, then the hint is correct. Use 'out' parameter modifier instead of 'var' to specify that the procedure does not read
it's parameter.

As a related point, under (at least some versions of) Delphi the IDE puts an explicit mark next to source lines that have associated binary code. Am I missing something, or does this not exist in Lazarus? I find it a useful indication that a fragment has actually been compiled rather than being optimised-out or excluded by a directive.

I believe that Andy's still unable to post to the list.

This would require access to the debug information of the compiled unit. Not a big deal with an integrated compiler (Delphi), but hard for Lazarus.

DoDi

Thanks, that makes sense. So it's basically the difference between feeding breakpoint locations forwards into gdb, and trying to get feedback from compiled binaries about where gdb could set breakpoints if it were running.

gdb can list the lines witch have debug info. MSEide uses this approach to mark the source lines with code.

Martin