Building

Once you have developed your application according to your specifications, you must then begin what will likely be a number of rounds of building, testing and debugging your application on an emulator and on a mobile device. This requires the following kinds of builds:

Note: In order to build your project, your require properly structured bld.inf and mmp files, as well as extension makefiles if they are used in the project. For more information on these file types, see "S60 project contents".

S60 includes mandatory sis file signing, which means that all sis files, including those used for testing, must be signed before installing them to the device. For more information, see "Security".

For an example of how to build an application for both emulator and device builds in the command line interface, see "Building and running HelloWorldBasic".

Differences between emulator and device builds

The differences between applications running on the emulator and on target devices (mobile phones) must be understood to avoid problems in testing and deploying your application.

The differences include:

  • emulator and device builds require different compilers.

  • installation of an application on a target device requires a sis file for installation

  • the emulator and device environments treat the processes and threads differently

  • the emulator and device environments treat the maximum stack sizes for applications differently

For more information on the differences between emulator and device builds, see Emulator/native platform differences in the Symbian OS Library.