How I built my first Qt Application in Visual Studio 2010
I downloaded the Qt SDK (offline installer version which was 1.7 GB) from: http://qt.nokia.com/downloads
At the time of this writing, the Qt libraries version was 4.7.3.
Then I downloaded the VS-Addin, using the link at the bottom of the downloads page, titled “Qt Visual Studio Add-in”.
After installing both SDK, and the VS-Addin on my system, I started Visual Studio 2010. I tried to create a sample project by selecting: File > New > Project… > Qt4 Projects > Qt Application, and specified proper values for Name and Location. After going through the Qt wizard to the end, I encountered the following error message:
unable to find Qt Build!
To solve this problem specify Qt Build!
By going to the Qt setup directory, one sees that there are Qt SDKs available for different target platforms. For example I installed Qt in “D:\QtSDK\” and in that directory I see some folders which correspond to different target platforms such as Desktop, Madde, Symbian, and others. An appropriate platform directory should contain a bin folder inside. This is true about Madde, and Symbian, but the Desktop folder is a root for subdirectories related to different Qt versions and C++ compilers. Since I wanted to develop Qt applications with Microsoft Visual C++ for the Windows Desktop platform I went to the following directory which contains the required bin folder: D:\QtSDK\Desktop\Qt\4.7.3\msvc2008
For the next step, I had to introduce this directory for the Qt VS-addin. From the main menu, I selected Qt > Qt Options > Qt Versions. I pressed the Add button, and entered “Win 4.7.3” in the “Version name” field, and entered the above path in the “Path” field, and pressed OK. The path that I specified was added to the gird. Then I made sure that in the Default Qt/Win version, the version that I have just specified (i.e., Win 4.7.3) is selected. I pressed OK, and tried once more with the Qt New Project wizard. This time everything went OK, and I succeeded to create and build my first Qt Application in the VS 2010 environment.
Note: In fact the current Qt binaries are targeted for Visual Studio 2008. I was able to use the binaries (i.e., libs and dlls) because I had also Visual Studio 2008 and the corresponding C++ compiler installed on my machine. Otherwise, I presume that I would need to recompile the sources with the VS-2010 C++ compiler.