Professional Windows® Embedded Compact 7

DEBUGGING A PLATFORM BUILDER NATIVE CODE APPLICATION

As a subproject to the Compact 7 OS design, a Platform Builder native code application is compiled and included as part of the OS run-time image. As part of the application development and debugging process, you need to make changes to the application project, recompile the project to generate an updated executable for further testing and debugging, and repeat the process, over and over again, until you can generate an application executable that can deliver all the required functions with acceptable performance and user experience.

To recompile the OS design to generate an updated application executable for testing requires the newly generated OS run-time image to be downloaded to the target device to test the application, which is compiled as part of the OS run-time image. The repetitive tasks to recompile the OS design project and restart the target device to launch the bootloader to download the image are time-consuming and inefficient.

With the right setup and knowledge, you don’t need to go through the process to recompile the OS run-time image, reset the target device, launch bootloader, and download the recompiled OS run-time image. Instead, you need to download only an OS run-time image to the target device once and use the same instance of the OS run-time image launched on the target device to support the testing and debug effort for multiple iterations of changes to the application project.

This section works through ...