A Presentation Manager application, written in a high-level language such as C, is compiled and link-edited in a similar fashion to a regular OS/2 or DOS application. System Object Model object classes are created in a similar way. However, additional steps are required for the creation of a Workplace Shell object class, prior to compilation of the C source code.
This chapter describes the process of creating an executable Presentation Manager application or system object model object class. The chapter describes the process of precompilation for system object model object classes, and the compilation, link edit and resource compilation stages for both system object model object classes and Presentation Manager applications.
Figure "Development Process for New WPS Classes" shows the overall process used to create a new class in the Workplace Shell:
The starting point for a system object model class is the class definition file which, for classes written using the C language, has an extension of .CSC. The class definition file is used as input to the SOM Precompiler, which will generate a number of files from the class definition file: