I'm interested to buy/use QT. What I need from microsoft ?

A friend has talking me about QT. He likes it very much.
I'm interesated, but I dont see really 100% clear what I need from MS ?
(Because I'll need to use third party libraries compiled with visual studio).
Do I need visual studio ? Can be the express edition be sufficient ? or need I only the SDK ?
What are the differences betwen the qt-nokia lgpl products and the provided by Digia ?
Thanks

You don't actually need anything from Microsoft, Powerful Qt applications can be built without the visual studio environment. You can develop C / C++ applications using QtCreator, which is the Qt equivalent to visual studio.

I know my answer could be more in depth, but that is really the basic answer.

Welcome to the Qt community.

Leam.

Basically Qt does not have to use MS, you can build software in MingW/g++ for free on Windows platform, however if you want to use third libs/dlls (with MFC extension) compiled with MSVC++, then the VC++ is needed to link the static libs or import libs. If the third party dll api is simple, you can use it at runtime with LoadLibrary/GetProcAddress(), so no MS is needed at all.