Once you have developed your application according to your specifications, you must then begin what will likely be a number of rounds of building, testing and debugging your application on an emulator and on a mobile device. This requires the following kinds of builds:
Emulator builds, which are used only for testing
An emulator build is intended to be run on an SDK emulator for debugging purposes. The build process outputs are placed in the correct folder under the SDK emulator directory.
Device builds, which are used both for testing and for deploying the application
After developing, running, testing and debugging an application on the emulator you typically will want to build and run it on a target device. To do so, you must create a device build. The device build is intended to be run on a mobile device and the output is a file that can be installed on a mobile device.
For information on creating a device build for deployment, see To Make an Installation Package.
In order to build your project, your require properly structured bld.inf and mmp files, as well as extension makefiles if they are used in the project. For more information on these file types, see Tutorial 5: Symbian Project Contents.
The Symbian platform includes mandatory sis file signing, which means that all sis files, including those used for testing, must be signed before installing them to the device.
The differences between applications running on the emulator and on target devices must be understood to avoid problems in testing and deploying your application.
The differences include:
Emulator and device builds require different Compilers.
Installation of an application on a target device requires a sis file for installation.
The emulator and device environments treat the processes and threads differently.
The emulator and device environments treat the maximum stack sizes for applications differently.
For more information on the differences between emulator and device builds, see The Symbian build process.