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Qt Visual Studio Tools

The Qt Visual Studio Tools integrate the Qt development tools into Microsoft Visual Studio. This enables developers to use the standard Windows development environment without having to worry about Qt-related build steps or tools.

Sources

Use Git to check out the Qt Visual Studio Tools sources, using one of the following options:

git clone git://code.qt.io/qt-labs/vstools.git

git clone https://code.qt.io/qt-labs/vstools.git

Contributions to the Qt Visual Studio Tools project must be submitted to the qt-labs/vstools Gerrit repository. For instructions on how to set up a Gerrit account and contribute to Qt projects, refer to the wiki page "Setting up Gerrit".

Qt installation

To build the Qt Visual Studio Tools, a statically-linked installation of Qt is required. The version that is currently supported is 5.15.9.

Building Qt from sources

See the Qt documentation for the prerequisites and steps to build Qt from sources.

Recommended options for the configure tool:

configure -static -opensource -confirm-license -nomake examples -nomake tests -no-opengl

Recommended options for jom:

jom module-qtbase module-qtdeclarative

32-bit or 64-bit

Visual Studio 2022 is a 64-bit application, whereas VS 2019 is a 32-bit application. The target platform for which Qt is built must reflect this:

  • For Visual Studio 2022, use Qt built for the x64 platform.

  • For Visual Studio 2019, use Qt built for the x86 platform.

Build

After cloning the repository, follow the instructions below to build the Qt Visual Studio Tools.

Requirements

The following is required in order to build the Qt Visual Studio solution:

Environment variables

Set environment variables QTBUILD_STATIC_VSnnnn according to the installed VS versions, i.e.:

  • QTBUILD_STATIC_VS2019 = path to Qt installation built with msvc2019
  • QTBUILD_STATIC_VS2022 = path to Qt installation built with msvc2022

For example, assuming Qt is installed in the following directory tree:

C:
+--- build
     +--- qt_5.15.9_msvc2019_x86
     |    +--- bin
     |    +--- include
     |    +--- lib
     |    (etc.)
     |
     +--- qt_5.15.9_msvc2022_x64
          +--- bin
          +--- include
          +--- lib
          (etc.)

In this case, the following environment variables must be set:

QTBUILD_STATIC_VS2019=C:\build\qt_5.15.9_msvc2019_x86
QTBUILD_STATIC_VS2022=C:\build\qt_5.15.9_msvc2022_x64

Initialization

In a command prompt (a "regular" one, not a VS Developer/Native Tools prompt), CD to the root of the repository and run vstools.bat to initialize the solution and open it in Visual Studio, with the following arguments:

C:\...\vstools> vstools -init -startvs

This will:

  • Delete all output files;
  • Restore NuGet packages;
  • Run an initial text template generation;
  • Open the solution in the VS IDE, ready to build/debug.

This procedure must be repeated when opening the solution on another version of VS. For example, assuming VS 2022 and VS 2019 are installed, to open the solution in VS 2019 after it has already been initialized and used in VS 2022, run the following:

C:\...\vstools> vstools -vs2019 -init -startvs

By default, if no VS version is specified, the most recent version is selected.

Target platform

The solution platform must be set to 'x64' for VS 2022, and 'x86' or 'Any CPU' for VS 2019.

Debug

To debug the Qt Visual Studio tools extension, the QtVsTools.Package project must be set as the startup project. Also, the target binary for the debug session must be set to the Visual Studio executable (devenv.exe), with the option to start an experimental instance.

Follow these instructions to configure the solution for debug:

  • In the solution explorer: right-click QtVsTools.Package > Set as startup
  • In the solution explorer: right-click QtVsTools.Package > Properties
  • In the properties dialog: select the Debug page
  • In the debug properties page, set the following options:
    • Start external program = path to the Visual Studio executable (devenv.exe).
    • Command line arguments = /rootSuffix Exp.

Documentation

To build the Qt Visual Studio Tools documentation, run qmake && jom docs from the root directory of the vstools repository. You need to have qdoc and friends built already.

See the Qt documentation for the prerequisites and steps to build Qt documentation from sources.