How to start Qt development on Windows, but targeting Maemo 5? - windows

I've recently heard about Qt and read about how fun it is to develop with. By the way, I'm also buying a Nokia N900 and I heard that its operating system, Maemo 5, supports Qt quite nicely, so I thought I'll give it a shot.
I'm a .NET developer, so I'd prefer to develop on Windows, and if it is possible, using Visual Studio.
I downloaded the latest Qt SDK. I started up the Qt Creator and created a simple "Qt4 Gui Application". It was working fine, however, I couldn't find any options to compile for Maemo 5 anywhere.
Then, I downloaded the Visual Studio plugin and tried to create a "Qt Application" with that, however, no matter which Qt project type I chose, after clicking the OK button, the dialog just kept popping up again, so it couldn't create anything.
I also read about the Maemo 5 SDK, however, it only seems to work on Linux. (Every walkthrough for Windows started with setting up a virtual machine with Linux.) However, I'm not experienced with Linux at all, so I'd prefer to stay on Windows.
So my question is: is it possible to create Qt applications that will run on Maemo 5 while developing on Windows, or this is impossible?
Thank you in advance for any answers.
EDIT (Solution):
Since the time I started this question, a very nice development tool, the Nokia Qt SDK solves this problem very well. It is cross-platform and can be used to develop Symbian and Maemo apps alike. For the Maemo toolchain, it uses MADDE, which is exactly the tool recommended by the answer. (Note that it is no longer a technical preview anymore.)
Here is a very nice introduction video about the Nokia Qt SDK.

I would suggest getting used to Linux; after all, Maemo (or MeeGo, now) is really Linux underneath, and the official SDK is the Linux-based scratchbox.
That being said, there exists an unofficial community project MADDE:
This is a TECHNICAL PREVIEW of a new development tool for Maemo. MADDE stands for Maemo Application Development and Debugging Environment and offers the following features:
Command-line cross-compiling
Multi-platform support (Linux (32-bit/64-bit), Windows, Mac OS X)
Configurable for different targets & toolchains
Client for the device to simplify the development process
Simplicity
You are welcome to test the tool in your development process. But keep in mind that this is a technical preview. We highly appreciate your feedback in talk, the developer list and especially in bugzilla (Developer Platform -> MADDE).

Related

How to develop Windows app on Visual Studio for Mac

I recently bought an iMac in order to develop my App on Visual Studio for Mac in a better environment (lots of issues on Windows), but on the Visual Studio for mac, there is no UWP projects.
It is understood that I have to create a new .NET project, but what are exactly the steps to follow in order to achieve that correctly for the app to work on Windows with a peace of mind? Should I have gone with Visual Studio code, which support the .NET core framework completely?
I saw on other answers that I need the .NET SDK tool, and so forth, but further details are needed if you don't mind on the why (not the installation stuffs, only the tech savvy explanations for the app to build correctly at the end!
You will need to run a Windows installation (eg, via Parallels or Boot Camp) and then run the Windows version of Visual Studio to create UWP apps.
You can do a lot of the business-logic coding inside Visual Studio on MacOS, but you will need Visual Studio and the Windows SDK to use WinRT types (which are required to build a UWP app) and to correctly build / package the app for deployment.
.NET is a big ecosystem. As you cannot develop all kinds of .NET projects using Visual Studio on Windows (Xamarin.Mac for example), you cannot do the same using Visual Studio for Mac (like you found, WinForms/WPF/UWP and so on). Such limitation comes from vendor SDK availability or other underlying systems.
In your case, you can easily develop web apps, Mac apps, and iOS apps. If you do want to develop Windows specific apps, like the other answer shows, please use Windows.
You mentioned ".NET SDK", but I believe that should be ".NET Core SDK". .NET Core apps are cross platform. Thus, you can develop such apps in Visual Studio for Mac, and then deploy to Windows. However, so far only console apps and web apps can be developed. What might happen in the future is still to be determined.
Visual Studio Code, however, is just a code editor. It won't give you extra flexibility.
For those whom imperatively needs to develop their app on all platforms, here is what I did, and the pros and cons:
Buying an Imac, thinking that I could also develop UWP projects within it
After realizing that I couldn't, I bought a cheap Windows 7 pro License on ebay (around 5$), and installed it on VirtualBox.
From there, I upgraded to Windows 10 for free and installed everything. It worked like a charm.
Cons: Buying a brand new IMac while a Macbook pro would have been better. An old one even since YOU CAN'T upgrade the ram.
Working on 8go of ram computer when you must give 4go of RAM to your VM isn't quite great. 4go gets you a laggy environment! Really frustrating.
So, prefer something older, but up-gradable (a cheap Macbook pro with 16go of RAM would do).
Not to mention that you will have to install Ubuntu as another VM in order to setup a .Net core Server for the majority of you.
What environment to favor while developing, most importantly when you are a C# and Xamarin noob like me?
The best being to develop from Mac as you will have FAR LESS ERRORS AND BUGS than in VS for Windows.
Correcting mistakes is really daunting and the best is really to develop from Mac to mitigate the damages, but it won't be hurdles free as well!
It took me more time debugging than coding within VS Windows.
After developing chunk of your app within Visual Studio MAC, the best is to get the code on the windows machine and arrange it to work in UWP.
UWP apps compile fastly and like a charm, so better is to get rid of errors within macOS, IOS, Android, and then go and adapt to UWP. This is easier IF YOU THINK ABOUT CHOOSING THE CORRECT LIBRARIES (working on all platforms, hence check my last advice).
From VS Mac, compile using macOS as a host! It's the easiest way to develop fastly, and correct your bugs.
Here is an article on how to get started from Mac:
https://blog.xamarin.com/preview-bringing-macos-to-xamarin-forms/
Cons: Always having to commit the code for it's use within UWP. But that's also a good way to save your project as well, so that if you screw up (like it happened to me numerous time) you roll back.
Hope that helps others whom didn't know what to do and where to start.
ALSO:
Don't follow tutorials dating from before 2017. Use the .Netstandard/.NET Core framework to develop your App so that libraries are more portable (following the blog article above should do).
Otherwise, headaches ahead!

Does Linux have anything equivalent to Microsoft .Net other than the Java APIs or .Net for linux

The international manufacturing company that I am working for is considering moving from Windows to Linux. The only reason for this that I am aware of is that the Windows automatic updates occassionaly cause some of their applications to fail. Apparently, they do not know how to turn this off. What other reasons they may have, I do not know (cost, the mobile phone effect?). My question is does Linux or some popular variant of Linux have a development environment equivalent in power and functionality to Microsoft .Net other than what Java offers, the Linux version of .Net (Mono) offers, or running Windows as a virtual machine on Linux?
It's kind of unclear what you are looking for... a Mono IDE that runs on Linux?
Have you looked at http://monodevelop.com/ ? It's not Visual Studio, but it's really not bad as IDE's go, and I think it's cross-compatible with VS project files. Should be packages available for any major Linux distro -- I know all the Debian based ones have it.
Mono's API is pretty compatible with .NET, though there are differences in some of the supporting libraries. There are apache extensions to do ASP.NET, but they are fiddly to get set up correctly.
It's a usable platform though, and it's possible to write Mono code that's 100% .NET compatible if you stay away from certain assemblies that haven't been ported yet.
I know I am 9 months late. You may have found your solution. You may look at IronPython.

What prevent Cocotron to be crosscompiled on Visual Studio instead of Mac OS X?

Seems like Cocotron is a good choice:
http://macdaddyworld.com/2008/10/27/adventures-in-cocotron/
But crosscompilation is on Mac / XCode. What prevents to be able to do the other way round ?
Update: just stumbled upon this news When would Visual Studio for Mac OS X /Objective C finally released as announced by Steve Ballmer?
I guess it is technically possible but out of Cocotron's scope. Cocotron works by having code developed for the Mac be compiled targeting Windows. As Apple don't provide SDKs and cross-compilers for Windows, the Cocotron project is writing another SDK whose API is compatible with Apple's and uses underlying Windows (or Linux, or Solaris) and auxiliary APIs as needed. The project also provides the cross-compilation toolchain.
Notice that the original intent of Cocotron is to provide a way for Mac developers to target their projects at Windows and/or some other Unix-based operating systems.
You want it the other way around. As such, someone would have to provide a suitable cross-compiler toolchain and somehow tell Visual Studio to use that, and link against Cocotron. I can see this happening in two ways: either Windows developers make the effort of adapting toolchains/Cocotron to Visual Studio, or Chris Lloyd is hired to do it. You can always ask him. ;-)
Also, I'm not sure if nib loading works in Cocotron but if (or when) it does, Windows developers would probably want a UI design tool similar to Interface Builder.

How to development in Visual Studio and then deploy apps to Linux machine

How to develop app in Visual Studio and then deploy apps to Linux machine (OS - Ubuntu, web server - Nginx). Can any explain the steps, it will be a great help
I would say that there are three ways how you can develop apps for Linux using mono.
First is using only Visual Studio for development and from time to time deploy your app to Linux to see potential issues. I personally use this scenario because it's simple and when you are not messing with MS specific stuff or yet fully unsupported things then you shouldn't have problems (at least I didn't so far). Disadvantage is that you will discover mono specific problems only during runtime on Linux machine.
Second approach is using Visual Studio with Mono Tools. I tested it when it was in beta and it was sometimes quite handy (you will move the phase of discovering mono specific problems to your dev environment, however you can still have some certain issues on Linux machine), but since this tool doesn't support debugging for now I don't use it personally.
Third approach is to use only MonoDevelop on Linux (since debugging is now supported only in Linux). With 2.2 release this IDE becomes really good and suitable for development however I have tested only console and basic ASP.NET MVC apps so I can't tell you if it's ready for bigger projects.
Deployment to Linux is quite easy - I just installed proftpd on Linux machine, configured it and copied project there from Windows machine.
If you are developing an application for Linux in C (as Nginx is) or C++, you need to develop on Linux.
There are many IDEs for Linux that you can use for this.
You can also try to run Visual Studio in Linux using Wine.
Use Mono on Windows and compile your apps with it , I guess Apache is only supported ... Disclaimer - I do not have personally experience with it ...

What's the best setup for Mono development on Windows? [closed]

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I started trying to play with Mono, mostly for fun at the moment. I first tried to use the Visual Studio plugin that will convert a csproj into a makefile, but there seemed to be no version available for Visual Studio 2005. I also read about the MonoDevelop IDE, which sounded nice. Unfortunately, there's no pre-fab Windows package for it. I tried to follow some instructions to build it by combining dependencies from other semi-related installs. It didn't work, but that's probably because I'm a Windows-oriented guy and can barely spell "makefile".
So, my question is this: What's the lowest-energy way to get up and running to try some Mono-based development on Windows?
I'd recommend getting VMWare Player and using the free Mono development platform image that is provided on the website.
Download Mono
Setup time for this will be minimal, and it will also allow you to get your code working in .NET and then focus on porting issues without a massive hassle of switching machines and the like. the VMWare Player tools will allow you to simply drag and drop the files over to copy them.
I'm looking to take a couple of my .NET apps and make them Mono compliant, and this is the path I'm going to take here shortly.
A year later and the answer to this has change greatly. You can now use MonoDevelop on Windows, or if you are more comfortable in Visual Studio you can use the Visual Studio Tools to write everything and then debug on in VM to make sure it is working on Linux.
#Chris I have found that Visual Studio is the best IDE for developing against .NET -- I think the best way to target Mono is really just to develop and build in Visual Studio under Windows then just run those binaries directly on Linux (or whatever other Mono platform you are using). There are free versions of Visual Studio if licensing is a concern. If you are developing under Linux, the best software is probably Eclipse with a Mono plugin (see The Mono Handbook - Eclipse for installation instructions) but keep in mind it doesn't have near the amount of features or language integration Visual Studio has.
#modesty Mono is a 3rd party open source implementation of the .NET framework which allows you to run .NET applications on platforms other than Windows.
One of the best things you can do if developing with Visual Studio for Mono is to get MoMA http://www.mono-project.com/MoMA. This will inspect any number of assemblies that you build and generate a report showing potential Mono problems (e.g., methods not implemented in the mono library). It can be run from a GUI or the command line for use in automated builds.
Miguel had a post about debugging Mono running on linux with remote debugging on Visual Studio. This may be something you want to look into... Using Visual Studio to debug Mono. There is also a new project called CloverLeaf whose goal is enabling debugging Mono on Windows in Visual Studio.
There's just no reason to build your app using Mono; the whole point of the .Net CLR is that the compiled output is cross-platform.
So you can simply build it using your favourite IDE (and if you like IDEs, Microsoft's is the best one to use) and then test it on Mono. Even if you get Mono working on Windows, it wouldn't be a very good test of your app's portability: what if your app does silly things like assuming filenames have backslashes in them, or that there's something special about a folder called Program Files? The best way to do portability testing is to actually test your app on the target platform.
And that's pretty easy to do with a Linux VMware player like the one at http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html.
Personally, I'm just compiling in Visual Studio 2008 as if it were for .Net 2.0 and then running in Mono (VS2008 on Windows in a VirtualBox, Mono on OSX). All the problems come up at runtime, anyway, so the system works perfectly.
I just found this very new link, which is amazing and shows you how to set up Visual Studio 2008 for Mono.
At the same time, setting up Mono on OpenSuse or Ubuntu inside a VirtualBox (Sun's product) is easy, painless, and doesn't force you to abandon whatever platform you normally live in.
This is not relevant to your question, but I might note that I just got into Mono and I'm amazed at how much of .Net is implemented, including much of the Winforms stuff.
My first instinct would be the rather unhelpful "Install Linux". You are somewhat swimming against the current to try and develop in mono under windows. Installing GTK and everything is a bit of a bother in my experience.
If you do feel like using linux, then you could Try Ubuntu
Otherwise:
There's some information here: http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:Windows and it seems the cygwin toolchain might be your best bet. I don't think you're going to be able to avoid makefiles, sadly. I found a slightly more explicit tutorial from O'Reilly.
#modesty: Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. Sponsored by Novell (http://www.novell.com), the Mono open source project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications. -- From the Mono site.
Eclipse plugin for Mono is dead. On Linux use MonoDevelop or X-Develop if you like good commercial support (although MonoDevelop is closing on them fast feature-wise). On Windows SharpDevelop has custom MSBuild targets for compiling the code against Mono.
As Mono and MonoDevelop are changing fast, be sure to use the latest released versions, even if they are not marked as stable yet (e.g. versions shipped with stock Ubuntu are terribly outdated).
The VMWare image is a great way to start testing Windows-developed code on Linux. Don't touch cygwin unless you are already very conformable with it.
I liked the idea of trying to use MonoDevelop mostly just to make sure my stuff would work against the Mono runtimes. I guess it would also be possible to get crazy with msbuild and write some custom targets that tried to build against Mono, but that's basically emulating the now-defunct plug-in's functionality which I assume was non-trivial to build. I do have minor experience with cygwin, and I am happy typing "configure" and "make" all day long, but when a problem occurs in that process, I'm virtually screwed. I'll probably try to play with all this again, but if it takes me more than a couple hours to come up with a way to build comfortably against the Mono runtimes, I'll probably just bail.
I will try the Eclipse idea. I use that for Java, so I might be able to get the c# stuff to work. We shall see...

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