This article describes the plug-in for the Eclipse IDE that I've written which allows to write Symbian programs under Eclipse. It's quite simple (the lack of debugger is probably it's biggest drawback) but definitely nicer than running ABLD commands from the command prompt.

Before you begin

To develop under Symbian OS you will need a Symbian OS SDK and a Win32 compiler.

You can have a free Win32 build environment based on Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit by proceeding as described here. The Platform SDK is enormous but I think the only thing you need is the Build environment (64-bits) from the Core SDK for the dumpbin.exe program located in it. You don't need to setup the PATH. The plug-in will take care of it.

The plug-in works also with the Visual Studio suite. The Borland C++Builder didn't work because ABLD could not locate the c0epocd.obj which is located in <root-dir>\lib. I don't know how to setup this.

The Symbian SDKs can be downloaded from the phones manufactures sites. Note that there are different versions of the SDKs for different Win32 compilers. This plug-in is known to work with Nokia Series 60 SDK 2.1 for Visual C++ ("Borland&Microsoft" version) which can be downloaded from http://www.forum.nokia.com.

Eclipse also requires Java 1.4.x. To check the version of your Java type "java -version" from the command prompt. If you have an older version download the Java 2 Standard Edition JRE (Java Runtime Environment) 1.4.2 from http://java.sun.com.

Installing Eclipse

Go to http://www.eclipse.org and download the Eclipse 3.0 "Platform Runtime Binary" (about 24MB). You can download the Eclipse SDK instead (about 86MB) if you want to have also the possibility to write Java programs and plug-ins for Eclipse (if you want to write in Java you will also need the Java SDK instead of the JRE).

On the Eclipse site go to Projects -> Eclipse Tools Projects -> C/C++ IDE (CDT) and Download CDT 2.0.

Install the Eclipse Platform simply by unzipping the content of the archive to e.g. C:\Eclipse. Unzip the CDT archive in such a way that the content of the plugins directory goes to the plugins subdirectory of your Eclipse installation and the the features directory goes to the features subdirectory of your Eclipse installation.

symbdev-0.5.2.zip Download the Symbian plug-in and unzip it analogically to the CDT. To start eclipse start the eclipse.exe file in the main Eclipse directory.

Using the plug-in

Go to Window > Preferences > Symbian OS Development > Win32 Tools. If you have luck your compiler will be autodetected by the plug-in. The plug-in detects the Visual C++ Toolkit with the .NET SDK and Platform SDK as described in the article, Visual Studio .NET 2003 (it will try to detect .NET 2002 and 6.0 in the same way, but I don't know if it works) and Borland C++Builder 5, 6, and X (but as mentioned above C++Builder doesn't work).

If you compiler is not listed you should configure it manually - select "Add..." put the paths that should be added to the PATH variable to make it work and choose the ABLD target (wins for Visual C++, winsb for Borland C++Builder and winscw for CodeWarrior).

Go to Window > Preferences > Symbian OS Development > Symbian SDKs and check if the plug-in detected the SDKs. Sometimes the plug-in couldn't open the devices.xml with the Bad handle error. If it happends restart Eclipse. If you have more than one Win32 compiler, you can set a default compiler for a given SDK in that window.

If you have at leat one SDK and one compiler you can create a Symbian OS project. Go to File > New > Project > C++ > Symbian OS. In the next page of the wizard write the eclipse project name. On the third page you can choose the SDK and compiler (you can later change these settings) and a template. For the first project choose the Basic Series 60 application template. This will create the HelloWorld application. On the last wizard's page enter the Symbian project name - this string will be used to genereate the names of the classes, application installation directory etc. If you don't want to use a development UID you can change it here.

After pressing Finish the project should be genereated and built. On the console page you will see the output of the ABLD commands. After the build will be finished on the Problems tab you will see the errors and warnings found by the plug-in by parsing the output. The plug-in might not recognize some error messages (e.g. if a program is missing the error message is generated by cmd.exe and depends on the language version of Windows) and you will have to check the console output but it should recognize all the errors of GNU make and nmake, so when compiling for the WINS target it should warning you if you would want to run a program which failed to compile. It cannot parse the output of e.g. the Borland make and compiler so it will report no errors.

By default Eclipse is in Automatic Build mode and will build the program every time you save your work or launch the emulator. When you save the program save all the files at once or the builder will build the project with some new files (the save ones) and some old (the not saved ones). Unfortunatelly Eclipse doesn't have one Save All shortcut, but you should press Ctrl+Shift+S if you modified more than one file or Ctrl+S if you modified only one file. The best solution is to press the first combination and if the build doesn't start, press the second.

Eclipse will not rebuild the project if you don't modify anything. If you want to rebuild a project (e.g. to try another SDK) make a small modification in a file.

If your program compiled without errors you can start the emulator. Choose Run > Run. Choose Symbian and choose new. There is one line to configure - the project name. Choose your project and choose Run. After the first successful run you can run the last configuration with Ctrl+F11.

To import a program into Eclipse create an empty Symbian OS project choose File > Import > File system and choose the program's directory as the source and the project directory as the destination.

Source Code

symbdev-0.5.2-src.zip