Espen Riskedal, Maurice Kalinowski and Thomas Hartmann, Software Engineers, Trolltech GmbH

Windows CE is Microsoft's answer to the demands for a real-time operating system that has low CPU and low power requirements. We have always received a lot of queries from our customers if we were ever going to support it. And now we can finally give a satisfactory answer because in the Berlin office, three developers are working full time on this.

Qt/WinCE has been in development for a while. We started in October 2006 and have already had two releases; internally and to partners for testing. The plan is to take it module by module (QtCore, then QtGui etc.) and steadily move towards a full port. At the moment we're basing  it on Qt 4.2.x, but we will move to Qt 4.3.0 the moment it has been released since we know there are a lot of optimizations and cool new features in Qt 4.3.

The current status is that we have our Windows buildsystem handling cross-compilations and shadow builds; we have ported QtCore, QtGui and ActiveQt; we have our own special Windows Mobile and Windows CE styles – and we have autotests running nightly. We're moving on with looking at getting the filesize down for our .dlls, porting QtNetwork and optimizing painting performance.

Here are some screenshots showing of Qt applications running in different Windows CE and Windows Mobile devices:

Click to enlarge

Qt/WinCE requires Visual Studio 2005 – and that's about it. We use the emulators and SDKs available from Microsoft – so if you have VS2005, then you're all set to start testing Qt development on yet another platform. We're targeting Windows CE 5.0 and above.  A technology preview of Qt/WinCE is available for download here.