The ValaCE project was born just as a proof of concept to see if Vala could be used for developing Windows CE applications.

It was developed in a few nights and weekends and tested only on my Htc phone so don't expect to be very complete or that it works everywhere.

It consists of:

• GLibCE*: a port of glib / gobject / gthread to Windows CE
• windows.vapi: vala bindings to the Win32 C interface
• valaforms: a simple library that wraps the Win32 UI controls in a more object oriented way.

* Take in mind that GLib was modified in order to support Windows CE and its porting is very incomplete. If you plan to use it in a C project consider that GLibCE port was done only to support the requirement of the GObject library and it's not very clean.

Download

Releases: http://code.google.com/p/valace/downloads/list

Source code repository: http://gitorious.org/valace/valace

Contacts

Since ValaCE is very young I haven't setup any discussion group yet. I'll setup if and when it will be required, meanwhile if you want to contribute with code & fixes just use the google code issue tracker or if you want just contact me wrote an email to this address:

sejerpz at tin dot it

Where to start

Just looking around?

• See the example code
• See the screenshots

Want to write a program with ValaCE?

• Download and Install the required tools as stated in the Compile wiki page
• Download the valace-runtime-preview archive valace-runtime-preview.tar.bz2
• Then read this wiki page my first program

Want to enhance the CE porting or ValaForms (VForms) library?

• Start from here compile

Why Vala?

Vala is a new object oriented language similar but not equal to C# and it uses GLib and GObject for the foundation of its object type system.

So Vala properties, classes interfaces and events can be just thought as a nice and convenient syntax around the gobject capabilities.

The main advantage of Vala upon C# is that the code is compiled in machine language and more over that you have a strict control on the generated C interface and ABI.

Memory is automatically managed at compile time using reference counted objects, this permits to still have a certain degree of control on when allocate & deallocate it, but also free the developer to think every time about leaks etc...

For more informations

The Vala language:

http://live.gnome.org/Vala

How memory management works in Vala:

http://live.gnome.org/Vala/ReferenceHandling

GLib & GObjects.

http://library.gnome.org/devel/gobject/stable/pt01.html