Qt 4.5 with Visual Studio 2008 (VC++ Express)

Qt is a cross platform GUI toolkit from Nokia. Its SDK is available under an LPGL license, it means we can use it free of charge to develop proprietary, commercial, closed-source software (thanks to Nokia). However, the current LPGL release leaves some gaps in using Qt from within Visual Studio 2008. This is somewhat understandable given that Visual Studio integration was a commercial-only offering and Nokia has Qt Creator (and not Visual Studio). My problem with Qt Creator is it uses MingGW (gcc) compiler which is nowhere near as good as VC++ 2008. Also for Visual Studio background like me, who is not familiar with Qt creator, learning Qt Creator will take time. Thanks to Wiria and AK who brought Qt to my table for a review.

Qt GUI Toolkit is very useful to develop portable application (single source codes) for *NIX, MAC and Windows (including Windows 98 but not being tested for Windows 7). In this post, I will show you how to start using Qt SDK only with Visual C++ 2008, you can use FREE Visual C++ 2008 express too.

Build VC++ Version of Qt

- Download and install qt-sdk-win-opensource-2009.01.1.
- Install the SDK to default directory, in my case C:\qt\2009.01. I didn;t install MingGW and Qt Creator as I don’t need.