[Qt-interest] Qt open source and VS 2008... how to make it work?

[Oliver.Knoll at comit.ch]

David Ching wrote on Friday, February 19, 2010 3:23 AM:

>> ...
>> I need to use Qt with Visual Studio 2008.
> 
> Welcome from a fellow Qt'er on Visual Studio!

Also note that even though Qt provides a nice "Qt integration" for Visual Studio, that plugin won't work with the *Express* versions - simply because the Express don't support plugins (on purpose - if you need this, take $$$ into your hands).

That is true for VS 2005 Express, but I strongly believe that this still holds for the VS 2008 Express and probably the upcoming 2010, too.

That does *not* mean that you can't use Qt with the Express versions. It simply means that you need to either

- have your Visual Studio projects (re-) generated from the Qt *.pro file (see qmake and the 'vcapp' template)
- manually add the "post-build" steps to the *.h header files which need to be moc'd/*.ui files which need to be compiled

Disadvantage of the former (qmake): you loose any custom settings you do within Visual Studio each time you re-generate the Visual Studio projects (because you have added new source/UI files to your *.pro files, for example). Advantage: platform-independent: you can generate Makefiles for Unix/Linux, Windows, Mac...

Disadvante of the later (Visual Studio): it is a pain to manually update the post-build steps! But doable... and the advantage is that e.g. it is very easy to set dependencies between projects (e.g. your *.exe and *.dll(s)), the header dependencies are automagically set (so when you change a header the dependent projects get re-build as well etc.)


Cheers, Oliver
-- 
Oliver Knoll
Dipl. Informatik-Ing. ETH
COMIT AG - ++41 79 520 95 22