What's your Windows CE 5.0 build process?
- From: "Andrew Schweitzer" <anschweitzer@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 8 Jul 2005 08:45:25 -0700
Hello out there. We are upgrading from a 4.2 to 5.0 and we are having
some difficulty / confusion. I was wondering how other people do their
builds. Any comments appreciated.
We use platform builder to create an entire image. The customer never
downloads anything to our board but the entire image. Additionally, we
do all development in-house. We don't need to give anyone else an SDK.
With 3.0 all our developers had a copy of Platform Builder.
*All applications were created in platform builder and were attached to
the .wce/.pbw workspace files. During development, individual apps
could be downloaded to a PC card on the board, then the board rebooted
to load the modified app. We didn't use the debugger, just printfs.
*To build the entire image, developers called an IDE custom tool which
ran a batch file. The batch file called
cepb WorkSpace.pbw /MAKE "WorkSpace - Win32 (WCE PPC821) Release"
/REBUILD
*To make an official build release engineering called the same batch
file.
With 4.2 we were going to use a similar model (but 5.0 came along
before we finished)
*All applications created in Platform Builder (this time we had a
debugger!). It was relatively easy to re-create the 3.0 projects in
4.2.
*To build an entire image (for developers or release eng) we were going
to repeat 3.0 steps: call a batch file which called cepb on the command
line.
With 5.0 we are not sure what to do.
*Building applications in 5.0 has so far been difficult. The 5.0 IDE
seems much less easy to work with than 4.2 (so far). Sources files are
not as easy to control as 4.2 projects, even with aid of IDE.
Additionally there have been a few glitches, including failure to
compile STLPort in 5.0 (we could call MS tech support about this one).
Is anyone out there building their applications in 5.0? Or does
everyone just use the SDK and eVC?
*Using and SDK it was much easier to re-create the projects. But the
build process seems more complicated. Can anyone offer advice? Here's
how it seems the developer's build process should look, using an SDK:
1) Build the image in PB5.0 without applications
2) Export an SDK
3) Install the SDK
4) Create applications using eVC
5) In PB5.0, add the output files of the eVC projects to the image.
6) Rebuild the image.
There seems to be a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue (I suspect I'm just
not fully up to speed) if the platform then changes (which our do
rather frequently): to export the SDK you seem to have to build a
run-time image. But if the run-time image includes the files built with
eVC... there seems to be a problem. Does the build process just
complete with warnings if the files are missing?
So is this how release engineering might create a build for QA or
customer?
1) Build must be 100% re-createable from source.
2) Update from source control.
3) Clean image.
4) Clean eVC projects.
5) Build image, ignoring warnings that eVC-output files aren't there.
6) Export SDK
7) Install SDK [I suppose to be pathological we should unstinall old
SDK first]
8) Build eVC projects
9) Rebuild image.
Also for quick / error free builds, the more that can be done by a
batch file the better. The only step I'm not sure about is installing
the SDK. I'm not sure if that can be done on the command line.
Thanks for any comments, and if you actually managed to make it through
reading this long post.
.
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