Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper

Trolltech
www.trolltech.com
 Abstract

This whitepaper describes Qt for Windows CE, the port of Qt to the Windows CE platform.
Qt is a cross-platform C++ framework for GUI applications, and Qt for Windows CE ex-
poses this powerful API to application developers targeting Windows CE. Qt for Windows
CE enables developers to create and deploy native applications for Windows CE 5.0 and
Windows Mobile 5.0 as well as later versions. Qt for Windows CE produces applications
that follow the native look and feel of the platform.
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Contents
1. Introduction 3

2. The Benefits of Qt for Windows CE 4

2.1. Cross-Platform Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2. A Rich Set of Standard Widgets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.3. Native and Custom Styles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.4. Signals and Slots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.5. Automatic Layouts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.6. 2D and 3D Graphics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.7. Networking, SQL, XML and Scripting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.8. Internationalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

3. Development Tools 11
3.1. Visual Studio Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.2. Qt Designer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.3. Qt Assistant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.4. Qt Linguist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

4. Working with Custom SDKs 16

4.1. Custom Builds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
4.2. Customizing the Feature Set . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

5. Community and Feedback 18

6. Conclusion 19
Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

1. Introduction

Qt for Windows CE is an attractive way to unify development for the many vari-
ations of embedded Windows platforms currently available, simplifying devel-
opment on Windows CE for native Windows CE application developers and Qt
developers alike.

Microsoft offers two main operating systems for the embedded market: Windows CE
and Windows XP Embedded. Each of these is available in a variety of different specialized
versions aimed at targeting different device types. Since Qt for Windows CE is designed
to work with a wide range of embedded Windows platforms, the main problem facing de-
velopers is choosing which variant of Windows to use and deploy their applications on.

SDKs for embedded devices

Windows CE Windows CE
without phone capabilities.
Standard SDK Typical devices are PDAs,
tablet PCs and control panels.
Pointing devices and keyboards
Windows Mobile
are usually supported.
Pocket PC /
Classic Edition

Windows Mobile SDK for portable media devices Windows Mobile SDKs for embedded devices
or media centers. with phone capabilities.
Smartphone /
Portable Media Used on Zune devices. Typical devices are mobile
Standard Edition
phones and PDAs with phone
SDK for information and capabilities.
Windows Mobile Windows Mobile
entertainment systems for The devices usually support
Pocket PC Phone / keypad inputs and sometimes
Automotive automobiles.
Professional Edition
pointing devices and keyboards.

Windows CE is a real-time operating system created specifically for embedded devices with
low CPU and power requirements. Windows CE only provides a subset of the functions
and libraries found on Windows desktop platforms but supports several processor archi-
tectures, including ARM, Intel x86, MIPS and SH-4. Native applications for Windows
CE need to be specifically written for this platform and are not binary compatible with
Windows desktop applications.

Windows Mobile is built on top of Windows CE and adds a different graphical shell and
a different visual style than the one provided by default in Windows CE. Windows Mo-
bile also provides special embedded versions of well-known applications, such as Internet
Explorer and Windows Media Player. Windows Mobile is used in consumer products,
such as mobile phones and PDAs, and only supports the ARM architecture.

In contrast, Windows XP Embedded is a modularized version of Windows XP. Although any

native Win32 application can run on Windows XP Embedded without any alterations,
Windows XP Embedded usually requires a lot more resources and has higher run-time
licensing costs than Windows CE. As a result, Qt for Windows CE is not suitable for use
with Windows XP Embedded.

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Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

2. The Benefits of Qt for Windows CE

Qt for Windows CE presents a common API for desktop and embedded develop-
ment, providing features that would otherwise be unavailable on Windows CE,
and enabling a single source tree to be used for desktop and embedded builds.

Windows CE presents a challenge to developers of native applications on Windows in that

only a subset of the desktop APIs and libraries are available for embedded development.
The cross-platform philosophy behind Qt enables Windows CE to be treated as just another
platform.

Qt is a comprehensive application framework that provides more than just GUI features.
Key technologies for many application developers on Windows CE are those related to
graphics and the user interface. Qt for Windows CE supports OpenGL ES for 3D graphics
rendering, includes readers and writers for many common image formats, and provides
features to help with the internationalization and localization of applications.

2.1. Cross-Platform Development

Qt is a cross-platform C++ framework for GUI applications. This means that applications
written using Qt will work unchanged on any of the platforms that Qt supports. At the
moment, Qt is supported on all flavors of desktop Windows, Linux, all of the major Unix
variants, Mac OS X, Embedded Linux and Windows CE. The API exposed by Qt for Win-
dows CE is identical to all the other versions of Qt this means that an application written
for Windows CE can be ported unmodified to run on Mac OS X, Windows XP, Embedded
Linux and other platforms supported by Qt.

Qt for Windows CE supports several SDKs out of the box:

Windows CE 5.0 Standard SDK for ARM, X86, SH-4 and MIPS

Windows CE 6.0 Standard SDK for ARM

Windows Mobile 5.0 (all editions)

Windows Mobile 6.0 (all editions)

Custom SDKs are also supported (see Working with Custom SDKs on page 16). Note that
there is currently no out of the box support for the Windows CE Automotive or Portable
Media SDKs from Microsoft.

Microsoft provides two different pricing structures for Windows CE run-time licenses: Win-
dows Embedded CE Core and Windows Embedded CE Professional. The run-time license
cost per unit shipped is substantially higher for the Professional SKU due to the inclusion
of a media player, Office file viewers and remote desktop capabilities. It is important to
note that Qt for Windows CE supports both these configurations.

There is no actual Standard SDK for Windows CE 6.0 but it possible to generate one using the defaults
found in Platform Builder.

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Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

Figure 1: Some of the widgets found in Qt for Windows CE (Windows Classic style).

2.2. A Rich Set of Standard Widgets

A key advantage of Qt for Windows CE is its intuitive and powerful API, which it shares
with versions of Qt for other platforms. Qt for Windows CE enables developers to rapidly
create rich, native GUI applications for the Windows CE platform.

Qt for Windows CE provides a rich set of standard widgets that are used to create graphical
user interfaces for applications. These include common user interface elements, such as
buttons, progress bars, labels, combo boxes and frames. Standard input controls, such as
line edits and text editors are supplemented with editors for dates and times (including
a calendar widget), spin boxes and dials. More complex widgets include tool boxes, group
boxes, tab widgets, and scrolling container widgets. Data-oriented views, such as lists,
trees, and tables can be used to present information stored in databases (see Networking,
SQL, XML and Scripting on page 9).

Widgets are not arbitrarily divided between controls and containers; all widgets can be
used both as controls and as containers. Custom widgets based on existing widgets can
easily be created by subclassing existing Qt widgets, or designed from scratch if necessary
(see Figure 1).

Widgets that accept input are able to notify other objects via Qts signals and slots inter-
object communication mechanism (see page 7), simplifying application logic and the pro-
cessing of user input.

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Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

Figure 2: Qt for Windows CE in the different native styles for Windows CE: Windows Mobile 5.0
Pocket PC and Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone.

2.3. Native and Custom Styles

Qt for Windows CE automatically uses the native style for an applications look and feel,
providing two special styles for the Windows embedded platforms Windows CE Style and
Windows Mobile style both of which are determined at run-time (see Figure 2). Qt for
Windows CE automatically makes use of the native menu on Windows Mobile and takes
care of repositioning special dialog buttons, such as the OK button.

Programmers can modify existing styles or implement their own using Qts powerful style
engine. Qt comes with a set of styles which are also available in Qt for Windows CE. Among
them are are Cleanlooks, Windows Classic and Plastique.

Another way to create a customized look for an application is to use Qt Style Sheets, a tech-
nology similar to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), that is used to customize the appearance
of widgets in much the same way that CSS descriptions are used to customize HTML ren-
dering in Web browsers. It is possible to apply a style sheet to individuals widgets, whole
windows, or even to entire applications.

Per-widget style sheets can also be accessed when user interfaces are created with Qt De-
signer (see page 12), making it easy for designers to experiment with the look and feel of
applications before any code is written.

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Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

Figure 3: Qt for Windows CEs layouts handle switching between view modes automatically.

2.4. Signals and Slots

Another advantage of Qt for Windows CE is the ease with which it handles inter-object
communication. Developers use an easy-to-use mechanism called signals and slots to
connect application components together.

Widgets emit signals when events occur. For example, a button will emit a clicked signal
when it has been clicked. Programmers can connect this signal to one or more slots (meth-
ods) which are then invoked whenever the signal is emitted. This mechanism requires no
subclassing of the widgets in use and makes it easy to connect an applications logic with
its visual representation.

Signals and slots are fully supported by the Qt Designer GUI design tool (see page 12).

2.5. Automatic Layouts

Qt for Windows CE provides layout managers for organizing child widgets within their par-
ent widgets area. They feature automatic positioning and resizing of child widgets, sen-
sible minimum and default sizes for top-level widgets, and automatic repositioning when
the contents or text font changes.

Qt applications will automatically maximize dialogs where sensible and follows the user
interface guidelines of Windows CE and Windows Mobile applications. This means that if
a device changes display orientation or has a different screen resolution, it will be handled
automatically (see Figure 3).

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Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

Figure 4: Qts graphics capabilities include SVG rendering features and the Graphics View frame-
work for highly interactive applications.

2.6. 2D and 3D Graphics

Qt for Windows CE contains both low-level and high-level classes for painting.

A common painting API unifies the process of low-level painting on widgets and other
paint devices, yet provides highly optimized functions to do most of the drawing that GUI
programs require. It can draw everything from simple lines to pie charts, chords and
complex vector paths. It can also draw aligned text and images. More advanced features
are also supported, including gradients, anti-aliased painting, transformations, coordinate
system handling, composition modes and clipping.

Qt supports all the major image formats (PNG, JPEG, GIF and TIFF) as well as the Scal-
able Vector Graphics (SVG) file format, incorporating the static features of SVG 1.2 Tiny
(see Figure 4).

Qt also provides a high-level framework that helps developers create, view and manipulate
a multitude of 2D graphical items. The Graphics View framework provides a scene-oriented
API for managing and interacting with a large number of items, and a view-oriented API
for visualizing them, with support for features such as zooming and rotation (see Figure
4). Interaction with items in a scene can be controlled using standard keyboard and mouse
controls, but custom interaction controls can also be added.

Qt for Windows CE supports OpenGL ES for creating hardware accelerated graphics on

devices that provide implementations.

OpenGL is an industry standard API for 2D and 3D graphics which provides a powerful,
low-level interface between applications and accelerated graphics hardware. OpenGL ES
is a subset of the OpenGL standard meant for use in embedded systems. Hence, it has a
smaller, more constrained API.

Qt for Windows CE uses EGL 1.1 to embed OpenGL ES windows within the Windows
CE window manager. Developers can use OpenGL ES-enabled widgets in Qt applications
by subclassing the appropriate class and using the OpenGL ES API to render 2D or 3D
graphics.

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Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

Figure 5: An SQL table displayed in two different views.

2.7. Networking, SQL, XML and Scripting

In addition to the rich set of widgets and classes for advanced graphical applications, Qt
for Windows CE also includes several modules that cover the non-graphical aspects of com-
plete applications. These modules provide features such as multi-threading, file handling,
secure network communication, support for SQL databases, XML handling, application
scripting, and a unit-testing framework.

The Qt Network module provides classes to make network programming easier and portable,
supporting application-level protocols such as HTTP and FTP while implementing socket-
level classes for TCP and UDP communication. Qt makes secure network handling very
simple through the use of SSL on platforms where OpenSSL is available.

The Qt SQL module enables the seamless integration of databases into applications. It
supports all the most commonly used SQL databases and provides an interface that plugs
right into Qts item view widgets. This makes displaying and editing databases very easy
(see Figure 5). Currently only SQLite is officially supported by Qt for Windows CE.

The Qt XML module provides a stream reader and writer for XML documents and C++
implementations of SAX2 and DOM Level 2 parsers. The DOM API provides an interface
for reading, writing, and in-memory manipulation of the content and structure of XML
files. The SAX2 parser, on the other hand, provides an event-driven mechanism that feeds
applications with document information as it reads each XML file.

The Qt Script module provides classes for making Qt for Windows CE applications script-
able. Qt Script is based on the ECMAScript scripting language which, for many applica-
tions, is essentially the same scripting language as JavaScript.

9
Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

Figure 6: Qt Image Viewer running in English, German and Norwegian.

2.8. Internationalization

Qt for Windows CE makes internationalization as painless as possible for developers. All

input widgets and text drawing methods in Qt offer built-in support for various languages.
Qts font engine is capable of rendering text containing characters from a variety of differ-
ent writing systems, both correctly and attractively (see Figure 6).

Qt for Windows CE supports most of the worlds writing systems, including Arabic, Chi-
nese, Cyrillic, English, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Latin and Vietnamese. Qt will
automatically combine the installed fonts to render multi-language text.

Far-Eastern writing systems require many more characters than are available on a key-
board. The conversion from a sequence of key presses to actual characters is performed at
the window-system level by software called input methods. Qt automatically supports the
installed input methods.

Since Qts string handling uses the Unicode 4.0 encoding internally, every written lan-
guage in widespread use can be processed transparently using familiar text processing
operations.

Qt for Windows CE includes tools to facilitate the translation process. Programmers can
easily mark user-visible text that needs translation, and a tool extracts this text from the
source code. Qt Linguist (see page 15) is an easy-to-use GUI application that reads the
extracted source texts, and displays them alongside context-sensitive information ready
for translation. When the translation is complete, Qt Linguist outputs a translation file for
applications to use.

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Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

3. Development Tools

Qt for Windows CE also comes equipped with a powerful set of applications to

help with the development of graphical applications, from GUI design to trans-
lation and deployment. Comprehensive documentation is supplied in the form of
a help browser with complete API documentation and a set of code examples. In-
tegration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 completes the developer experience.

Three applications provide the core of the suite of tools included with Qt for Windows CE:

Qt Designer is a graphical user interface design tool for Qt applications. Qt Designer

allows user interface designers to help with the task of creating functional user inter-
faces.

Qt Assistant displays Qts entire documentation set, and works in a similar way to
a Web browser. Unlike Web browsers, Qt Assistant applies a sophisticated indexing
algorithm to provide fast full text searching of all the available documentation.

Qt Linguist and other tools are provided to help with the process of localizing appli-
cations and organizing the translation process.

Commercial licensees can also take advantage of a comprehensive integrated solution for
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

3.1. Visual Studio Integration

Qt for Windows CE together with Visual Studio 2005 provides a professional way of devel-
oping embedded applications.

Qt for Windows CE automatically creates Visual Studio project files that take care of all
compilation and linking steps, facilitating deployment of the necessary Qt libraries to em-
bedded devices. This means that deployment of a Qt for Windows CE application from
within Visual Studio is just one click away.

The integration with Visual Studio Integration takes advantage of Visual Studios highly
extensible architecture to make C++ application development faster and easier (see Figure
7), and includes the following features:

A fully integrated form editor with layout support.

Wizards for creating new Qt projects.

Automated build setup for Qt-specific build steps.

An integrated resource management system.

Integrated Qt documentation.

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Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

Figure 7: Qt Visual Studio Integration in action.

Since Windows CE usually has no console output, Qt for Windows CE provides a mecha-
nism for applications to automatically output their debug data to the Visual Studio debug
view.

Visual Studio also provides tools for remote debugging, profiling, file viewing and registry
editing, all of which simplify the process of development. The combination of these features
with Platform Builder results in a complete and powerful development solution.

3.2. Qt Designer

Qt Designer is a graphical user interface design tool for Qt applications. Applications

can be written entirely as source code, or using Qt Designer to speed up development.
A component-based architecture makes it possible for developers to extend Qt Designer
with custom widgets and extensions, and even integrate it into integrated development
environments.

Designing a user interface with Qt Designer is a simple process. Developers drag widgets
from a toolbox onto a form, and use standard editing tools to select, cut, paste and resize
them. Each widgets properties can then be changed using the property editor. The precise
positions and sizes of the widgets do not matter. Developers select widgets and apply
layouts to them. For example, some button widgets could be selected and laid out side by
side by choosing the lay out horizontally option. This approach makes design very fast,
and the finished forms will scale properly to fit whatever window size the end-user prefers.

Platform Builder is the tool provided by Microsoft which allows developers to create their own custom
versions of Windows CE.

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Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

Figure 8: Editing a form in Qt Designer.

Qt Designer eliminates the time-consuming compile, link, and run cycle for user interface
design. This makes it easy to correct or change designs. Qt Designers preview options
let developers see their forms in other styles; for example, a developer on Mac OS X can
preview a form in the Windows style.

Commercial licensees on Windows can enjoy Qt Designers user interface design facilities
from within Microsoft Visual Studio.

Developers can create applications with menus, toolbars, balloon help and other standard
features. Several form templates are supplied, and developers can create their own tem-
plates to ensure consistency across an application or family of applications. Programmers
can create their own custom widgets that can easily be integrated with Qt Designer.

Qt Designer supports a form-based approach to application development. A form is repre-

sented by a user interface (.ui) file, which can either be converted into C++ and compiled
into an application, or processed at run-time to produce dynamically-generated user inter-
faces. Qts build system is able to automate the compile-time construction of user interfaces
to make the design process easier.

3.3. Qt Assistant

Qt Designers online help is provided by the Qt Assistant application, which is used to

display Qts entire documentation set and works in a similar way to a Web browser. Qt As-
sistant applies a sophisticated indexing algorithm to provide fast full text searching of all
the available documentation.

Developers can deploy Qt Assistant as the help browser for their own applications and doc-
umentation sets. Qt Assistant renders Qts HTML reference documentation using standard
Qt widgets.

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Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

Figure 9: The Qt Designer and Qt Assistant applications.

14
Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

Figure 10: Working on a Japanese translation with Qt Linguist.

3.4. Qt Linguist

Qt Linguist is an application that helps with the translation of Qt applications. Transla-

tions for Qt applications are traditionally stored in .ts format files. However, Qt Linguist
also supports XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) files, improving interop-
erability with third party tools and services that support this format.

Translators can edit .ts files conveniently using Qt Linguist, using keyboard shortcuts to
navigate the user interface and process translated strings quickly and efficiently. The user
interfaces dockable windows can be reorganized to suit the translators personal working
style.

Applications often use the same phrases many times in different source texts. Qt Linguist
automatically displays intelligent guesses based on previously translated strings and pre-
defined translations. Guesses often serve as a good starting point that helps translators
translate similar texts consistently. Common translations can also be stored in phrase-
books to make the translation of future applications more efficient. Qt Linguist can option-
ally validate translations to ensure that accelerators and ending punctuation are trans-
lated correctly.

Qt Linguists comprehensive manual provides relevant information about the translation

process for release managers, translators and programmers. Examples provided with Qt
show how translations can be integrated into a projects build system.

15
Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

4. Working with Custom SDKs

Qt for Windows CE can be used together with custom versions of the Windows
CE SDK to make customized version of the Qt libraries, allowing development to
be tailored to suit the needs of each project.

Microsoft provides ready-made SDKs for development on Windows CE. For Windows CE
5.0, developers use the Windows CE Standard SDK 5.0 for ARM, x86, SH4 and MIPS. Win-
dows Mobile, which is only available for the ARM architecture, uses separate SDKs. For
Windows Mobile 5.0, these are called Pocket PC, Smartphone and Pocket PC with Phone;
for Windows Mobile 6, these are called Standard, Classic and Professional.

All of these SDKs are already supported out of the box with Qt for Windows CE. However,
device manufacturers may prefer to make their own customized version of Windows CE
using Platform Builder. In order for Qt for Windows CE to support your SDK, a custom
build specification needs to be created.

Figure 11: Running an application in the Windows CE 5.0 Standard SDK.

4.1. Custom Builds

Developers configure the version of Qt for Windows CE to suit the combination of archi-
tecture, platform and compiler they wish to target. Qt supports a variety of common com-
binations of these in the form of ready-made build specifications, included within the Qt
package. These specifications can be customized to suit the features particular to each
device.

Qts build system uses the information provided during configuration to create a project
file for Visual Studio (as described earlier; see page 11) which can be used to manage the
build process and perform debugging if appropriate.

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Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

Figure 12: The QConfig application enables customization of Qt builds.

4.2. Customizing the Feature Set

Often, only a fixed set of applications will be deployed on an embedded device. This lim-
itation makes it possible for developers to save resources by removing features of Qt for
Windows CE that are not required by any of those applications.

The configuration system allows developers to disable individual features by passing com-
mand line options to the configuration executable. However, since some features rely on
the presence of others, it can be time-consuming to track dependencies and specify them in
this way.

If a large number of features need to be disabled, it is more convenient to let the QConfig
tool (see Figure 12) keep track of the dependencies. Whole sets of features can be disabled,
and custom configuration files can be created by the tool that define preferred subsets of
Qts functionality for specific devices. These files contain macros to disable the unwanted
features, and can be created manually if preferred.

Qt provides several ready-made custom configuration files, defining minimal, small, medium
and large installations.

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Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

5. Community and Feedback

Many of the worlds leading commercial applications have been built on the solid
foundations provided by Qt. With thousands of open source developers using Qt
for KDE and other software projects, Qt enjoys the benefits of an active commu-
nity providing hints, tips and examples which are readily applicable to Qt for
Windows CE application developers.

Qt has an active and helpful user community who communicate using the qt-interest
and qt-embedded-interest mailing lists, the Qt Centre website at www.qtcentre.org, and
a number of other community websites and weblogs. In addition, many Qt developers are
active members of the KDE community. Qt customers receive our quarterly developers
newsletter, Qt Quarterly. A growing number of commercial and open source add-ons from
third parties are also available; see www.trolltech.com for the most up-to-date information.

Qts extensive documentation is available on-line at doc.trolltech.com. There are also a

number of books in English, French, German, Russian and Japanese that present and
explain Qt programming. Qts official book is C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 (ISBN 0-
13-187249-4).

Trolltech and its partners provide a range of training options for Qt, Qtopia and C++, in-
cluding open enrollment courses for the general public and on-site courses for customers
who have more specific training needs. See www.trolltech.com/training/ for more informa-
tion.

Qt for Windows CE is still in development, and we need your feedback to make it excel.
To test it out, please go to http://www.trolltech.com/qt-wince where you can download the
package as well as join the preview feedback mailing list.

Included in the commercial version of Qt for Windows CE is one year support service.
Trolltech has a highly professional support department that has in-depth knowledge of the
Qt framework and how to use it. Through customer surveys and other feedback we see
that our customers are extremely pleased with the support they receive and consider it
very helpful when using Qt.

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Qt for Windows CE Whitepaper 2008 Trolltech ASA

6. Conclusion

This whitepaper has highlighted many of the unique features that Qt for Windows CE
brings to the Windows CE platform.

Qt applications are cross-platform but still have the advantage of being native binary appli-
cations when deployed, requiring no virtual machine or third party applications to operate.
Most C++ memory management issues are handled by Qt, leaving application developers
to focus on higher level issues.

Qt applications follow the native look and feel of the platform, but are also highly styleable.
By making custom styles or simply by using style sheets, designers can radically modify
any the appearance of a user interface, from a single widget to a complete application.

Qt classes are easy to use and easy to extend. Thorough documentation and code examples
show how to use classes to construct applications and libraries. Qts signals and slots mech-
anism for inter-object communication makes it easy to connect user actions to application
logic.

Qt for Windows CE, together with Visual Studio 2005 and its remote development tools,
delivers the most mature and powerful solution for making embedded GUI applications for
the Windows CE platform.

Please visit http://www.trolltech.com/qt-wince for more information about availability, links

to online resources, and to obtain the most up-to-date package.

19
Index
books, 18 OpenSSL, 9

CPU architectures properties, 12

ARM, 3
Intel x86, 3 QConfig, 17
MIPS, 3 Qt Assistant, 13
SH-4, 3 Qt Centre, 18
Qt Designer, 12
database, 9 Qt Linguist, 10, 15
documentation, 13, 18 Qt Quarterly, 18
Qt Script, see scripting
ECMAScript, see scripting
EGL, see OpenGL scripting, 9
SDK, 16
FTP, 9 signals and slots, 5, 7
SQL, 9
graphical user interface, 5
SQLite, 9
design, 12
SSL, 9
translation, 15
style sheets, 6
graphics, 8
styles, 6
3D, 8
Cleanlooks, 6
GIF, 8
Plastique, 6
JPEG, 8
Windows Classic, 6
PNG, 8
SVG, 8 templates
TIFF, 8 form, 13
themes, see styles
help
toolbars, 13
balloon, 13
tools, 11
browser, 13
translation, 10, 15
HTTP, 9
Unicode, 10
indexing, 13
input methods, 10 Visual Studio, 11, 13
interfaces 2005, 11
dynamic, 13 integration, 11
internationalization, 10
widgets, 5, 12
JavaScript, see scripting writing systems, 10
layouts, 7, 12 XML, 9
DOM, 9
mailing lists
SAX, 9
qt-embedded-interest, 18
qt-interest, 18
menus, 13

networking, 9

OpenGL, 8
OpenGL ES, 8

20
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trademarks of the individual companies and are respectfully acknowledged.

Trolltech ASA operates a policy of continuous development. Therefore, we reserve the right to make
changes and improvements to any of the products described herein without prior notice. All infor-
mation contained herein is based upon the best information available at the time of publication. No
warranty, express or implied, is made about the accuracy and/or quality of the information provided
herein. Under no circumstances shall Trolltech ASA be responsible for any loss of data or income
or any direct, special, incidental, consequential or indirect damages whatsoever.

Copyright 2008 Trolltech ASA. All rights reserved.