After hours of tears, anger and frustration, I'm no further into my little adventure of trying out Qt development.

My goal : To develop deployable .exe applications in Qt, using VS2010 as my IDE. Yes I know about QtCreator/Eclipse, no I don't want to use either of them.

From the pain I've been through, it seems developing and deploying Windows applications with Visual Studio & Qt is basically impossible. Allow me to explain:

My steps:

  • Installed Qt addon 1.1.9 for Visual Studio - had the 1600 vs 1500 bug, so had to change to 1.1.8, nice of the documentation not to point out this known issue.
  • Built Qt in the VS cmd, about the only part that wasn't painful

    Qt Code: 
    1. configure.exe -platform win32-msvc2008 -no-webkit -no-phonon -no-phonon-backend -no-script -no-scripttools -no-multimedia -no-qt3support -fast
    2.  
    3. nmake
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After setting Include and Bin directories best as I could figure out (some documentation would have been nice) most of the

Qt Code: 
  1. IntelliSense: cannot open source file "QtGui/QApplication"
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and

Qt Code: 
  1. QTCored4.dll missing
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Type errors seemed to be cleared up, although intellisense and highlighting doesn't always work.

Now for deployment - how the hell does one generate deployable .exe files?! Even the .exe's generated by QtCreator don't even work :/


So in all honesty, is Qt really cross platform? Or just a great framework for linux, or "well it's better than wxwidgets" ?

I don't understand why it has to be such a painful experience, just to get setup and experiment with Qt on Windows, with my IDE of choice.

I was excited to try Qt as an alternative way to develop, but after so much frustration - and things still do not work properly - File->New MFC application sounds like heaven.