Metrowerks Codewarrior is probably the most known IDE for Symbian development. Although it is not the historical one (Symbian was using Microsoft tools before switching to Codewarrior last year), it is widely used in the Symbian community.

The IDE comes in three different flavors:

  Personal Edition:

1. Full IDE,
2. Build tools for the emulator and target device
3. Debugger (Emulator)
4. Project creation tool and MMP file import

  Professional Edition:

1. All Personal Edition features
2. On-device debugging (phones using MetroTRK) [1]
3. Support for Symbian DevKits (Symbian OS source code delivered to selected partners) and Symbian reference hardware

  OEM Edition:

1. All Professional Edition features
2. JTAG and Multi-ICE debugging
3. Virtio VXPS (Intel XScale) and VPOM (TI OMAP) emulators

There is not much to hesitate between the three versions. Unless you’re a big company, you’ll probably not need the OEM edition (US$5400). The Professional edition is still expensive (US$1674). The Personal edition is more affordable and sufficient for the vast majority of developers (US$399).

Installation

The first thing to do is to get a copy of the IDE. You can download an evaluation version from Metrowerks web site or buy a boxed version.

Once this is done, the installation process requires three steps:

1. install the CodeWarrior IDE
2. obtain and install a valid license
3. install at least one Symbian OS SDK

CodeWarrior runs on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 Professional, or Windows XP. There is not much to say on the installation. As usual, you will be prompted to install Java Runtime Environment and Perl (both are on the CD).

Once this is done, the software uses a temporary license that lets it function for 15 days [2]. Within this period, you must obtain a permanent license from Metrowerks to keep CodeWarrior running indefinitely. The easiest way to way to do this is during the installation process: at the end of it, a registration screen pops up to collects all the required information and offers to e-mail this to Metrowerks. In return, you will get a license.dat file that contains your license keys (take care that this license is usually bound to the computer on which the installation occured).

It is important to remember that CodeWarrior provides just a development environment. For developing Symbian OS software, the environment requires that you install an SDK from a Symbian OS phone manufacturer. You can get most of them from us or from Symbian