[Qt-creator] Building Qt 4.5.2 with MSVC 2008 For Use With Qt Creator - Observations

[Daniel Teske]

Just for the record and to the benefit of people that like to do the same.

> 1.  I downloaded the full SDK and installed it into c:\qt\4.5.2-vc.  I
> fired up the VS2008 Command Prompt and entered 'configure -platform
> win32-msvc2008' followed by 'nmake'.  First problem - 8 or 9 linker
> errors when building the QtWebKitD.dll.  The solution is the remove
> the following files:
You can download precompiled binary packages for msvc from the Qt Software 
page and simply use them inside Creator.


> 2.  There really needs to be a way to ignore examples/demos via
> configure, as building all of these takes a long time.  I wanted to
> end up with a bare bones Qt folder containing just the essentials and
> didn't count on all the examples being built.  It took nearly 3 hours
> on my machine!

I think there's a undocumented way to do that, others might know.

> 3.  Once the build has completed you can kiss goodbye to 4.5GB of disk
> space.  Yikes.  Digging around I found dozens of 'tmp' folders
> containing nearly 3GB of .obj files that aren't needed.  The make
> process should remove these.

Well, that would make recompiling take another 3 hours. It's standard to leave 
those object files there.

> 5.  Why don't Nokia supply a bare-bones Qt installation for Windows
> that is built with VS?
We do.

> 7.  Setting up Qt Creator to use the new DLLs was a breeze but I did
> need to rebuild the debugging helpers.
Right.

> 8.  The CDB debuuging helpers aren't as good as the gdb ones - no QMap
> support for example.  Be warned!
Yes, we'll get that fixed for 1.3. On the plus side debugging with cdb is much 
faster in my experience.


> Getting this to work wasn't too difficult but an official step-by-step
> guide from Nokia would be welcome.  It could cover things like full
> vs. minimal builds, etc.  For a novice this would be quite the
> exercise.
Well, the easiest is three steps:
1) Download the qt msvc binary package, install it.
2) In Tools\Options\Qt-Versions Point Creator at that Qt Installation and 
change the default installation to that Qt Version.
3) And rebuild all projects.

daniel