Using Lazarus to compile FreePascal applications for Windows CE devices on ARM processors

I already mentioned in my introduction post that I've switched to using FreePascal and Lazarus for most of my projects; and since I'm also developing for mobile devices, I was happy to see the development of an arm-wince part for those. Since this is quite new and I had some problems following the wiki entries for FPCs Windows CE port and Lazarus' Windows CE interface, I decided to add my own steps to my users page on the same wiki.

Part of those steps was to create some kind of mechanism to automate the steps to get a working arm-wince environment, since I was and still am playing around with constantly getting new versions. At first I though about a Lazarus app that downloads and installs everything, but in the end, it got a simple batch file, because that's what batch for. This webspace and blog is partly for offering files like lazarus-armwince.bat. I already got ideas to improve it: the arm files probably belong into a subfolder of the Lazarus folder for example, and instead of using the pp substructure from the original tutorial I based my own one on, the source could/should be downloaded into the fpcsrc substructure, user interaction for Subversion release would be nice, along with some other things.

Anyway, stay tuned for more topics and files here; examples on how to do archive compression/decompression as well as network communication from a WinCE device will follow soon.