Creating the Main Program (myapp.exe)

A Pocket Dyalog program is, like any other Pocket PC program, an .exe file. You may create a Pocket Dyalog program (e.g. myapp.exe) on the Pocket PC as follows: Start Pocket APL )XLOAD your application workspace (e.g. myapp.dws) Choose Make Executable from the File menu.

If you are building a program for distribution to others, you must check the Runtime executable checkbox. Clear this box only if you want to build a program that you can test and debug on your own Pocket PC. Make sure that the Evaluation executable checkbox is cleared.

Note: If you want to build an evaluation version of your program please click here for further info.

When you click OK, you will be prompted to name the .exe and choose the directory in which it will be saved. The system will then create it.

Pocket Dyalog .exe is not a complete stand-alone program. Instead, it depends upon the appropriate Pocket Dyalog engine which is distributed as a dynamic link library (dll). When you start a Pocket Dyalog .exe, the first thing it does is to load the Pocket Dyalog DLL; without this DLL it cannot run.

This means that to run your Pocket Dyalog program, the end-user must have previously installed the Pocket Dyalog Engine (DLL) on the Pocket PC.

Building the application file (myapp.zip)

Pocket Dyalog includes a sample Pocket Dyalog application named DAN (Dyalog APL Navigator) which is installed on your PDA alongside Pocket Dyalog as a separate stand-alone application.

Pocket Dyalog also includes all of the files and scripts that were used to create the DAN application. These files are intended as templates which you may modify and then use to build your own application. You can find the templates here

Note, that although you must create the application program (e.g. myapp.exe) on your Pocket PC, you actually put together a Pocket Dyalog application on a desktop computer and not on the PDA itself.

The steps involved in creating your own distributable application are as follows.

	On your desktop computer, make two directories, one (e.g. c:\myapp) to contain all your application files and one (e.g. c:\build_myapp) to contain the files that will build the distribution image.
	On the PDA export your workspace as an executable program (e.g. myapp.exe) as described above, choosing between a full and an evaluation version as required.
	Copy the executable program file (e.g. myapp.exe) and any other files that your application requires into the application directory (e.g. c:\myapp) on your desktop computer.
	Copy the Pocket APL application template files from your PDA into your application build directory (e.g. c:\build_myapp) on your desktop computer. The application template files are provided in the sub-directory \\Program Files\Pocket APL\Dan\install. These files are summarised in the table below.
	Modify the application build template files app.inf, app.ini and make.bat in your application build directory (e.g. c:\build_myapp) to specify your own application requirements. Click here for further info.
	Run make.bat in your application directory to create the distributable application (e.g. myapp.zip).

Sample Application Template Files