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Building Windows Mobile 6 apps using QT

Note: This article is a bit old, and applies to Windows Mobile 6, *not* Windows Phone 7

Because I use multiple platforms on a daily basis, I’m a big fan of cross-platform software. I’d been previous considering writing my personal apps in python/wxPython for this purpose, but with the recent announcement of QT going LGPL, I thought I’d try out QT and see if I could compile a program to use on my Fuze running WM 6.1 Professional.

Setting up the build environment has quite a few steps, but I hit surprisingly few snags along the way.

First, you’ll need an environment to build standard (not QT) Windows Mobile apps. I had an existing install of Visual Studio 2005, so I simply installed the Windows Mobile 6 Professional SDK Refresh and was then able to build and run apps for my Fuze. (I’m curious to know if this QT procedure would also work with this tutorial on building windows mobile apps using the free SharpDevelop).

To add QT support, I simply followed the official instructions (substituting wm60 for 50 where appropriate, since I’m building for Windows Mobile 6).  I used the 4.5 tech preview source availabile here. To test it all out, I opened up one of the example ‘.sln’ project files in Visual Studio and successfully compiled an exe. Copying this, along with the required .dll files from the QT/lib directory and ‘msvcr80.dll’ from ‘Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\ce\Dll\armv4i’ to my device allowed it to run perfectly.

I’m a bit worried about the size of the QT dlls on a mobile device (one is over 10MB), but I think the tradeoff is worth it (especially when compared to requiring a python interpreter being installed for python apps).

It’s amazing that with one set of code, I can have a program that will run on Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows Mobile, and soon Symbian S60. I have a feeling that I’ll probably end up doing most of my desktop/mobile coding in QT. Time to brush up on my C++…