Just remember, love is live, and hate is living death!
Black Sabbath: A National Acrobat
Using Lazarus to compile FreePascal applications for Windows CE devices on ARM processors
1 Jul 2006 | No Comments | posted by CCRDude | in FreePascal
I already mentioned in my introduction post that I’ve switched to using FreePascal and Lazarus for most of my projects; and since I’m also developing for mobile devices, I was happy to see the development of an arm-wince part for those. Since this is quite new and I had some problems following the wiki entries for FPCs Windows CE port and Lazarus’ Windows CE interface, I decided to add my own steps to my users page on the same wiki.
Part of those steps was to create some kind of mechanism to automate the steps to get a working arm-wince environment, since I was and still am playing around with constantly getting new versions. At first I though about a Lazarus app that downloads and installs everything, but in the end, it got a simple batch file, because that’s what batch for. This webspace and blog is partly for offering files like lazarus-armwince.bat. I already got ideas to improve it: the arm files probably belong into a subfolder of the Lazarus folder for example, and instead of using the pp substructure from the original tutorial I based my own one on, the source could/should be downloaded into the fpcsrc substructure, user interaction for Subversion release would be nice, along with some other things.
Anyway, stay tuned for more topics and files here; examples on how to do archive compression/decompression as well as network communication from a WinCE device will follow soon.
What is it about?
30 Jun 2006 | No Comments | posted by CCRDude | in Administrative, Delphi, FreePascal
Well yes, I don’t really like blogs, do I? Usually I don’t read any, and most personal stuff isn’t stuff I would generally post in a blog. But there are so much software development issues that I sometimes want to shout out…
Example: Borland Delphi. Delphi 2006 was released late last year. Since then, I’ve been posting about one bug per day. Out of the 130 bugs I have reported to Borland, only 5 or 6 have been solved yet, and I wonder how Borlands Quality Central creates those much better looking statistics. There are bugs open for more than three years. I can’t even open a project in the Delphi IDE properly – since Delphi 2005 at least, every second attempt to do so resulted in a “List index out of bounds” error.
The logical step was to step back from Delphi. I’ve been converting many projects to FreePascal and Lazarus recently. They offer compilers for Linux and the Mac, even for Windows CE (aka Windows Mobile) now. If I report a bug I can’t fix myself, it’ll most likely be fixed in a few days. Except for code refactoring or docking, it’s 0.9.x versions are more productive for me than Borlands 10th release of Delphi.
To cut a long story short, I’ll use this blog mostly for stuff related to this move of my development environment. No promises on how up-to-date I’ll keep it or what exactly I’ll post here though 
