Overview of GUI app building in How to build GUI applications

A Symbian OS GUI application has several components:

an application executable, which is an EXE that uses the GUI framework
a registration file, which contains non-localisable information
optional localisable information, provided by one or more localisable resource files and icon files

To appear on the shell, a GUI application (e.g. AppName.exe) must be located in the sys\bin directory. Applications built into the ROM must provide their registration files (e.g. AppName_reg.rsc) in the \private\10003a3f\apps directory, whilst applications installed via Software Install must provide their registration files in \private\10003a3f\import\apps. Resource files (e.g. AppName.rss and AppName_loc.rss) should be located in the resource\apps directory.

For further information on TARGETPATHs see this table.

The following pages discuss the special configuration issues associated with building for GUI application targets.