Programming with as little bloat as possible

I am interested in starting some programming projects for my new HTC Fuze PDA phone. I am particularly interested in using OpenGL ES. The phone runs windows mobile, but I do not want to program in Visual Studio because I don’t want to buy it and I don’t want to be tied to the windows platform.

How can I go about starting up a simple program with OpenGL ES 2.X? I see dozens of tutorials out for 1.X but all of them seem to use Visual Studio (except for one that uses BREW, but that seems to tie you down just as much as Visual Studio even though it is free).

Does anyone know where I can find a simple hello world type tutorial? Even just rendering an empty window would be wonderful at this point because I would have something to work from. I have never coded for a phone (or any other embedded device) before, but I would like to use C++ if possible.

Does the HTC Fuze have an OpenGL ES 2.0 h/w and an OpenGL ES 2.0 library?

If you want to avoid Visual Studio, your first task is to obtain a compiler. One likely candidate is the GCC ARM cross-compiler. Then you’ll have to figure out how to use it to build a Windows Mobile application. I expect you can find information about that on the Web.

The next step is to obtain libGLESv2.lib and libEGL.lib for the device so you can successfully link applications that want to use the OpenGL ES & EGL dlls on the device.

Then you’ll need Microsoft’s ActiveSync to copy the compiled applications to the WM device. You’ll probably need some debugging help too. Perhaps there’s a WM version of gdb. I don’t know.

BTW, your subject is a little misleading. The applications are going to be pretty much the same size and have the same performance regardless of whether they are built with Visual Studio or GNU tools.

Using Visual Studio doesn’t tie your application to Windows. VS doesn’t force you to use Windows API calls. Only the VS project & solution files are specific to Visual Studio. You would have to create the equivalents for tools for other platforms in order to build your applications for those platforms. The application source should not need changing. You can use the Visual Studio compiler from a GNU makefile and completely avoid project files but that does make debugging a little bit harder.

Regards

-Mark

Wow, I’m trying to do the exact same thing, except I own VS 2008 and my problem is figuring out how to get the OpenGL ES ‘bits’ I need, and where to put them so I can get coding! I’d like to be able to do native (C++) and/or Managed apps (C#).

Any pointers to the right place(s) appreciated!

-CB

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