I'm using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and I know there's the Qt VS Add-In. However I've chosen to not use it as according to an announcement by Nokia they will not release any further versions of it. So now would be a good time to change work practises.
I'm looking for a way to automatically call moc.exe on class files that need to be moc'ed, and for the moc'ed files to be compiled as well. I'll probably do this for the resource/ui compilers as well.
Qt's plugin simply creates Visual Studio build rules files - these are 'normal' xml files and anything can use them.
There were a series of add-in VS macros before the visual studio plugin became available.
Add-in is mainly useful to import .pro files to VS projects, after that you do not really need the add-in (unless for making it easier to change between different Qt versions).
Just make sure to define QTDIR in a project property page (.vsprops) as UserMacro and have it exported to the environment, then you can use it for $(QTDIR)\bin\moc.exe against Qt header files in the custom build step, similarly for UIs.
<UserMacro
Name="QTDIR"
Value="C:\Qt\4.6.3"
PerformEnvironmentSet="true"
/>
Related
I have a Qt project(.pro) which essentially uses Qt libraries and OpenGL and i need to integrate this project with an existing VS2008 project(.vcproj) which uses a 3rd party API on another system.
The VS project interfaces with a hardware(along with many other functions) through a serial port and i intend to use its event handler to trigger the actions in Qt( since a serial port cannot be opened by two programs simultaneously? )
I use Qt v4.8.1 with mingw complier. i did come across a VS plugin for Qt. but i'm not sure as to how the above task of integration can be done.
I'll be thankful if you can kindly shed some light on this.
My advice would be to completely integrate the source of the Qt project into the VS project. It's possible to compile Qt code in visual studio. Of course, this requires to configure your VS project to make it "qt-ready". In detail:
Integrate the source code of the qt project into the VS solution. This means, the header files, the cpp files and the ui files you might have.
You still need the Qt libraries on your system in order to compile QT source with visual studio. I recommend to install "qt-win-opensource-4.8.1-vs2008.exe". These are the special Qt 4.8.1 libaries for VS 2008 (pre-compiled). Can be found here: http://download.qt-project.org/archive/qt/4.8/4.8.1/
You have to tell visual studio how to "pre-compile" the Qt source with the installed Qt binaries. This can be down in two ways:
I. You can configure the project properties of your VS project. Unfortunatelly I have never used this way, so I don't know exactly how to do this.
II. You can use CMake to setup your VS project. CMake allows the simple integration of Qt libaries and compilers. Using CMake means to write a CMakeLists.txt, which generates the VS project for you. Here you can find a sample, explaining how to write a CMakeLists.txt with Qt support: http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake/Tutorials/Qt
Also, the Qt plugin for visual studio you mentioned is optional. You do not need it to build a Qt project with visual studio, but it makes some issues easier, e.g. debugging or calling the Qt designer from visual studio.
Hope this helps,
Michael
I have a huge Visual Studio 2010 solution. I work with Visual Studio 2005, so I want to convert the solution to the desired version. Basically, it's a portable C++ code so it should compile on Visual Studio 2005 too. Changing the version in the *.sln file doesn't help because the *.vcxproj format is completely different from the old *.vcproj format.
Recreating the solution by hand is not an option because of its size. Also there may be some non-default compiler flags, dependencies, etc. that I don't know of (and I can't look through ALL this XML junk that I don't understand).
There is already a related question on How Do I Downgrade a C++ Visual Studio 2008 Project to 2005. However, the utility suggested there supports at most Visual Studio 2008.
Any suggestions?
It really totally sucks, that every proprietary IDE today thinks it needs to create its own project file format.
"Dear IDE developers, just use Makefiles and create a nice GUI for it so that also people without Makefile knowledge can use it!" In VS6 it was at least possible to import/export Makefiles, but not today anymore. And it was possible to use nmake for automated builds. No IDE needed to be installed, just the toolchain which could be grabbed by a simple checkout without installation.
I use CMake now. It's free, it's cross-platform, it is well supported in free IDEs like KDevelop, QtCreator, etc. It can generate Makefiles and Visual Studio projects.
So you maintain only one project source, the CMakeLists.txt file and can work with any IDE. No pain with different versions of Visual Studio or with other proprietary project file formats.
This way you can generate or VS projects for developing and you can generate Makefiles for commandline builds using nmake like in the good old days.
BTW, it's much easier to change settings in a CMakeLists.txt than clicking through various GUI dialogs. But this is a matter of personal preferences.
In my work made a utility which utilized the EnvDTE.dll and scanned a vcproj-file and optionally all vcproj-files within a sln-file. It compared all settings with a "template" and would issue a warning or optionally update the setting to correct values. We used this utility so that settings would be verified to be correct and consistent throughout all projects. I haven't updated the utility to 2010 yet due to other priorities.
EnvDTE hasn't changed much from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010. Perhaps it is possible to create a simple utility which opens the vcxproj-file using DTE100 and saves it using DTE90, or earlier.
Easiest way is probably to create a new project in VS 2005, and use the add existing item dialog to add the code to the project. I'd suggest using 'Empty Project' as the project type, so you don't have a lot of rubbish autogenerated for you that you'll just delete anyway.
I haven't tried it, but this looks promising:
http://www.emmet-gray.com/Articles/ProjectConverter.htm
edit: Nope, not promising, sorry :-(
I downloaded open-source version of Qt from the site and have compiled it with nmake, but I'm having trouble using it in my projects. It seems that Visual Studio can't find the Qt headers, even though I added the paths to my PATH, INCLUDE, and LIB variables. I tried installing the Qt Visual Studio add-in but it only supports Visual Studio 2008.
Has anyone gotten Qt to work with Visual Studio 2010? Or do I have to wait until Qt 4.7 is officially released for Visual Studio 2010 support?
Either download the pre-built vs2008 package or build it using cmake's vs2008 profile and then open the resulting .sln file in vs2010 and let it do the conversion.
edit - annoying feature so far is that the vs plugin doesn't support vs2010 which makes it essentially impossible to use for desktop app development.
Traditionally VS support was part of the paid licences, with the OS package you only get mingw support. Things are changing, but might have some rough edges for a while.
OTOH, mingw has a HUGE advantage: deployment. You don't have to chase around the vcredist_x86 files and all the associated voodoo. Just be sure to include all the .DLLs you use and that's it.
Also, there's QtCreator. It's not as featureful or omniscient as VS; but it does feel a lot nicer and easier to use. It takes off all the tedious work of nmake, and embeds the UI editors. And it's cross platform!
honestly, for me VS can drop dead this minute and i won't miss it.
Qt V4.8.0 contains prebuilt binaries for Visual Studio 2010 so you don't need to build manually anymore:
http://qt.nokia.com/downloads/windows-cpp-vs2010
I'm going to develop a bunch of projects with Qt that should compile both under Visual Studio with Qt integration (commercial) and Qt Creator with LGPL SDK. My primary IDE is VS but I've grown to like Qt Creator too. It would be nice to be able to work in both of them simultaneously. I need to do it in some extent anyway.
The most annoying problem is project management. Should I create .pro file first and then import it to VS? Or should I create VS project first and create .pro file by Qt integration utilities? What's the best way to do it?
I would like to hear your ideas on the subject.
I use the .pro files as a basis and create VS projects from them. Using scoping rules I can set options that are specific for the VC++ compiler or the MinGW compiler. I haven't encountered any VS option yet I couldn't specify in a .pro file. OK, make that one: trying to set the warning level to 4 (win32:QMAKE_CXXFLAGS_DEBUG += /W4) didn't work because /W3 was still present.
For adding new files to the project I sometimes just add them to the .pro files and setup the VS project again. That way I don't have to worry about keeping both in sync.
Using this approach makes it easy to do automatic builds under a variety of compilers (Microsoft, Intel, MinGW, 64bit cross compilers)
Do you mean Qt Designer or Qt Creator? Qt Designer is the form builder, Qt Creator is the IDE.
I would recommend delegating your project management to CMake. Qt Creator now has support for cmake. cmake generates you project files based on a simple set of description files. I now use cmake even if I am just using visual studio because it is much easier to manage common settings between related projects than updating loads of settings in different dialog boxes. It also is also a multi platform build and is very clever at discovering the build tools and libraries installed on the developer system and creating the appropriate build output, make files, and ide project files.
I am glad you were able to solve you current issue QT Creator is a great tool. As much I like QT Creator and dislike Visual Studio, if you need to work with other developers on windows skipping support for visual studio in the future may not be an option.
I have had good luck using CMake ( http://cmake.org/ ) to generate my project files. I am working on a Linux/windows project where the developers can use just about any IDE and compiler. Learning to use CMake is easy, learning to make good cmake scripts takes a little time though. However, QT Creator has the ability to create the CMake projects for you, and you can customize and learn just as much of the CMake build script language as you need to.
Like this I have worked with visual studio, Code::blocks, QT Creator, clang, gcc/mingw and the vc++ compiler.
My approach was to create the project in VC++ and then export it to pro. I then tweaked all the pro files by hand and I keep them in sync by hand.
It's better to start with VC++, because VC++ has many more options that Qt's pro files.
Once you start changing more advanced options you will want to sync by hand
Make sure that both toolchains output the files in the same directories, or you might encounter issues such as moc files in your project dir that are updated only by QtCreator, while VC++ only updates the ones in GenratedFiles which the compiler can't see due to the former.
I have dropped Visual Studio for C++ development. Now I use only Qt Creator. All the troubles with parallel ways just do not worth it.
As may be known by many, the Express versions of Visual Studio 2008 don't include support for MFC and a few other packages required to compile a lot of windows programs.
So, here's my problem:
I have the full version of Visual Studio 2005. I've been using this to compile a project that a friend of mine was working on, so that I could test it out for him and continue to track bugs and things. Recently, he upgraded that project to VS 2008, which I don't have. So, I downloaded the express version in the hopes that I could simply compile with that, but no luck, it complains about headers missing left and right.
It seems to me that since I already have the full version of VS 2005, I'm bound to have at least some (perhaps older) version of the files in question that his project needs to compile against.
Is there a way I can convince VS 2008 to also look in 2005's directories for include files and library files to compile against?
Furthermore, is this a bad idea? I would really prefer not to go out and purchase VS 2008 full, as I'll never use it myself. (2005 does the job fine for me at the moment, and I tend to prefer GCC anyway.)
Thanks
You can use the VC++ compiler directly from the command line, or just create a new project w/ the source in Visual Studio 2005. Unless he is using some functionality provided in the new versions of MFC/ATL in 2008/2008sp1, you should be able to compile the project just fine.
See ("Create Project from Existing Source") in Visual Studio 2005. It is unfortunate that they don't include these libraries with the Express Editions.
Use the vcvars*.bat script(s) from Visual Studio 2005. See this blogpost from VC++ Blog to see how. You will use the old compilers, but the build system from Visual Studio 2008.
You can go into Tools>Options>Projects and Solutions>VC++ Directories
and alter the Include, Library, and Source (and Reference maybe?) folders to use VC++ 2005's folders.
I'd guess you just replace $(VCInstallDir) with a hardcoded VS 2005 path. I'd record the original values before doing this.
However, have you just tried using the OLD 2005 sln and vcproj files? Keep using 2005 on your end and 2008 on his. Keep two sets of these files for each IDE. Any issues are going to be with the library mismatch - which you're not avoiding by using 2008's tools with 2005's libraries.
The simple way to deal with this would be to revert the solution and project files back to their visual studio 2005 state from source control(you are using source control right?). At this point you can compile the project as long as your friend does not use any of the mfc 9 only functions.
The first thing I would try is loading this up in VS 2005 by just modifying the version of the .sln and the .vcproj files. In the .vcproj change the version from 9.00 to 8.00 and in the .sln change the format version from 10.00 to 9.00.
If you don't have fancy stuff in the project you have a high chance of just being able to use it like this. Also this would avoid having to update 2 project and solution files.
On this website it is shown how MFC code can be compiled with the Visual Studio Express versions:
link
Just for the record, I've done that(by modifying the include directories and library directories from inside the IDE) and it's working pretty well, I have MFC, ATL, everything.
I've found this explanation. http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/30439/How-to-compile-MFC-code-in-Visual-C-Express