Suggested Development process for Symbian S60 C++ Development.

1. Analysis and design:
Before starting to develop an application with an S60 C++ SDK, you must define at least
a) requirements,
b) scope, and
c) functionality
that you wish to implement in the application.
It is good idea to take into account the various capabilities required by the APIs that you intend to utilize in your application at this Phase only.

2. Coding
It is recommended that you use one of the supported IDEs [Visual Studio 2003/2005 with carbide.vs or Carbide.C++]. They provide project templates that you can use to create a standard project from a selection of project types. The template takes care of creating some of the basic folders and files that you need in developing an application. So developer donot have to worry and waste about creating repeated code sections.
note: I will be realsing a set of perl scripts that will generate templates projects to help development by avaoiding IDE. [I am making fixed to these scripts hopfully soon i will complete]

3. Creating and updating your build files.
Before you can build your project, you must first create or update the bld.inf, mmp and extension makefiles.
note: Different IDEs support these files in different ways. Your development environment may maintain these files or just use them when importing the existing project into the IDE, then you are a lucky developer.

4. Building the source files.
In S60 application development, builds are typically created for two different environments:

a) the emulator and
An emulator build is intended to be run on an SDK emulator for debugging purposes. The build process outputs are placed in the correct folder under the SDK emulator directory

b) the target mobile device.
The device build is intended to be run on a mobile device and the output is a file that can be installed on a mobile device. You have to specify which file goes where in a PKG file. Or your IDE can handle it.

Because the operating systems of the emulator and target device are different, two separate builds using different compilers are required. Here are some of the differances between both the builds.
01) emulator and device builds require different compilers.
02) installation of an application on a target device requires a sis file for installation
03) the emulator and device environments treat the processes and threads differently
04) the emulator and device environments treat the maximum stack sizes for applications differently

5. Testing and signing
All S60 C++ application installation files must be signed before they can be installed to a mobile device. Typically, builds are first tested in the emulator and then final testing is performed on the target device.

6. Deploying
Once your application is ready for deploying in a general release, package and deploy your application according to the steps in "Deploying". And you start making money if your application is not Free Application.

Note:
1. This development process is only a suggestion. Your process may different completely or partially from this, depending your type of application and organizational environment.