Recently, one may find lots of
rumours about future acvisition of Trolltech by Nokia.
I would'nt worry much about it. QT is GPL, and that means, we will always have it around.
Recently, i started some QT development, and previously i was doing it in my favorite OpenSuSE environment, using KDevelop 3.5. Untill I started to do some really hardcore programming, utilizilng lost of
BOOST and Computational Geometry (
CGAL). I found out, that Visual C++ 2005 has more comfortable Debugger, so i decided to switch my development back to Windows XP (thanx to MSDN AA) and VC++ 2005.
As you might already know, the
"official"OpenSource version of QT/Windows supports only MinGW GCC, which sucks. Previously, one had to use some magick
patches (here is an instruction:
how to patch QT to work with Visual C++ 2005) . Last time i tried to use them, i had non-working binaries in "Release" configuration. But the salvation came unexpectedly from
KDE project, with their release of
KDE for Windows.
The KDE for Windows itself is not much usefull -- there is no Desktop Environment yet, only some Applications available. Its biggest value is ... the Libraries!!!! and, of cource.. QT! wich supports VC2005 natively, witouht further patching. Here is small 1-2-3 how to start developing QT OpenSource apps in windows:
1) use Kde Windows Installer to install QT, and other libs that you might need (Boost? image handling libs? eigen? libz ? whatever...)
2) Get VC++ 2005 Express Edition (Kde installer may also help)
say, you have installed everything to D:\KDE, then i recommend to save it as Windows Environment variable (say, QTHOME) -- may be handy for team development, and stuff.
Now you are ready to create a "Hello world" app.
1) Open VisualStudio, create a new "Makefile" project. (Figure 1)
2) it will prompt for "build" "rebuild" and "clean" commands for Debug and Release configurations. For these i create 6 different custom .bat files, and specify them on prompt.
Your solution dir now has "helloworld" subdir. There we'll have to create several files:
main.cpp: (add it to the VS project as "source file")
#include
#include
#include
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
QApplication app(argc, argv);
QPushButton hello("Hello world!");
hello.resize(100, 30);
hello.show();
return app.exec();
}
helloworld.pro -- the QMake project file
SOURCES += main.cpp
TEMPLATE = app
CONFIG += warn_on thread qt stl
TARGET = helloworld
FORMS +=
HEADERS +=
INCLUDEPATH +=build_debug.batqmake
nmake Debugrebuild_debug.batclean_debug.bat build_debug.batclean_debug.batqmake nmake cleannow copy the last three into build_release.bat, rebuild_release.bat and clean_release.bat accoordingly, replacing "Debug" into "Release". you may add them into the VC project, for example, into another project subfolder, for later convininent modifications.
now you may press the "Build Solution" button, and see what happens.
the last two things remain:
1)
Debugger. You need to specify the executable.
2)
Intellisense. You need to specify the includepaths for QT and other libs.
Now, you may check at the QPushButton hello object how it works.
The last step: i used kde-installer 0.8.5 which installed QT 4.3.3. For some reason, the makefiles, created with QMAKE did not create the moc_- files.
i had lots of errors like:
moc_mainwindow.cpp
c1xx : fatal error C1083: Cannot open source file: 'debug\moc_mainwindow.cpp': N
o such file or directory
moc_mainview.cpp
c1xx : fatal error C1083: Cannot open source file: 'debug\moc_mainview.cpp': No
such file or directoryTo fix this, i had to manually rewrite my
qt.conf, which resides in the
bin directory of KDE installation.
for example, if you have installed KDE into D:\KDE, then you'd have to create/edit the file
D:\KDE\bin\qt.conf:[Paths]
Prefix=D:\\KDE\\
Documentation=D:\\KDE\\doc
Headers=D:\\KDE\\include
Libraries=D:\\KDE\\lib
Binaries=D:\\KDE\\bin
Plugins=D:\\KDE\\plugins
Data=D:\\KDE\\
Translations=D:\\KDE\\translations
Settings=D:\\KDE\\etc
Examples=D:\\KDE\\examples
Demos=D:\\KDE\\demosthat's all, folks! Happy Hacking!
