Developer Zone

Welcome to EMCC Software’s Developer Zone.

This page provides some useful tools for Symbian developers that are freely available for download by clicking on the appropriate link where directed.

Source Code examples

The full set of source code examples for our S60 book Developing Series 60 Applications from Forum Nokia.

Enabling Syntax Highlighting for Symbian OS keywords

This is a simple customisation which allows you to highlight user-defined keywords in Visual C++. User-defined keywords can be set to a different colour to C++ keywords, making Symbian OS keywords easier to spot. It works for Visual C++ 5.0 and 6.0.

Download the EMCC usertype.zip file

Unzip and save the file in the same directory as msdev.exe

Exit then restart Visual Studio

From the Tools menu, choose Options

Select the Format tab

In the Colors box, select User Defined Keywords and set the font settings to your preferences

Click OK

Alternatively, you can create your own usertype.dat as a plain text file with one keyword per line. For more information, see this MSDN article.

Symbian OS Variable Expansion

During a debugging session it is useful to be able to view the contents of a variable in a Watch window. However, Visual C++ is not always able to usefully display user-defined types. Fortunately, developers can customise Visual C++ so that complex new data types are properly expanded in Watch windows and datatips. This customisation is achieved by editing the autoexp.dat file, which is found in the same directory as msdev.exe. EMCC supplies an autoexp.dat file containing definitions for many Symbian OS classes, plus a Word document with instructions for customising the file further. To use our autoexp.dat file:

Download the EMCC autoexp.zip file

Unzip and save the file in the same directory as msdev.exe

Exit then restart Visual Studio

CLINDEX

clindex is a simple command-line tool that produces an index of the libraries within a directory and the classes and global functions they export. It provides an easy way of finding out which library a class is exported from, or of examining the full list of classes exported by a given library. clindex has the following useful features:

Output in HTML format for easy viewing

Index can be sorted either by class or by library

Classes are sorted ignoring Hungarian notation (for example, CActive is listed under A, not C).

USAGE

Download clindex.exe and copy it to a location on your path

Open a command prompt

Move to a directory containing .LIB files 

Run clindex, without arguments. If any LIB files are found, you will be prompted to view the class index once it has been created.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Windows NT or 2000

Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0 or later

If you see the message ERROR: Cannot find dumpbin.exe on your path, you will need to configure your environment to enable the Visual C++ command-line tools. This is typically achieved by running VCVARS32.BAT from your Visual C++ installation. See this article on the MSDN website for further details.